Movie Review: Beyond a Shadow of a 'Doubt'

Couldn't help myself with the pun, there. I just saw the film 'Doubt', written and directed by the playwright, John Patrick Shanley (a good Irish-Catholic boy, no doubt), who won a Pulitzer Prize for his original play of the same name, and starring one of the tightest, most brilliant casts I think I've ever seen on screen: notably, the ever-formidable and ridiculously talented Meryl Streep, and the equally virtuosic chameleon Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, Viola Davis in particular deserves major acknowledgment, as her one speaking scene in the film, opposite Streep, showed how powerful an actor can be even with less than ten minutes on screen. Amy Adams was also terrific as a naive young nun who becomes sort of a human moral scale, weighing the accusations flying between Streep's Sister Aloysius and Hoffman's Father Flynn with a bewilderment that mirrors that of the audience as we grapple with the grave issues presented in the film.

The film can be summarized, or written off, depending on how you see it--the way that another amazing film, 'Brokeback Mountain', could be written off as the 'gay cowboy movie' when it's so much more than that--as the 'Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal movie'. And despite the injustice of that description to the film, I think if that kind of controversial summary makes people come to the theater to watch it, then great. I think every Catholic or recovering Catholic, at minimum, should see this film. I don't want to say too much more because this is the type of film that's best enjoyed through conversation with other viewers, because the director/writer leaves so much up to subjective interpretation. And I like that. He and the actors have set up a world that is totally believable (although H. could barely believe that even during my Catholic school experience in the 1980s I knew nuns like Sister Aloysius and was as terrified of them as the school kids in the film are of Streep's character), and with it, they pull you in irresistibly with universal and immortal themes of faith, redemption, the complexity of human nature, and, yes, doubt.

As a survivor of sexual abuse myself, I appreciated the nuances of morality and the lack of judgment of the characters that permeated the film. It offers a very humanizing portrait of what can be a very polarizing and dehumanizing (for all people involved, from perpetrator to victim) experience.

I will say that the film is far from perfect, with some heavy-handed symbolism getting in the way of even this ultra-ritualistic Catholic School-girl's enjoyment. But all in all, it's a tightly-crafted, important film and seeing it is well worth the price of admission.

If you need more encouraging, a couple reviews that I liked can be found on the Independent Critic web site (this one is written by a sexual abuse survivor, at Pajiba (which wins the award for best self-description of its site: Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People), and the New York Times.

Suffice it to say that beyond a shadow of a doubt (there I go again with the puns!), this is probably the best film I've seen this year. I hope Oscar will too.

Waste Not, Want Not

I just saw Wall-E last night, the new movie about the last lonely robot on a future, uninhabitable Earth whose job (or 'directive' as they say in the film) is to compact bits of trash into small cubes and build huge skyscrapers of compacted garbage. Although it's a G-rated film, the talented folks at Pixar definitely had an adult audience in mind when they made this strangely and wonderfully sweet and romantic dystopian movie, and I think everyone should go see it. As a film, it's brilliant cinematically, plot-wise and in terms of character development and 'acting' by the animated robots. As a commentary on the effects of our rampant consumerism and accompanying laziness (especially in the First World) on the Earth and our own evolution, it's also totally on target and profound. My stomach even started to turn a little when they showed the potential future of human beings in outer space: each human being, fat from lack of exercise and having machines do everything for us, sitting in individual moving chairs that have people plugged in to an instant-gratification communication, shopping and entertainment monitor (sound familiar to anyone?) and oblivious to anything else going on around them. It was bizarrely cute, creepy, comical and uncanny at the same time.

The film made me think a lot about how much we waste things in this country, in this society. I remember when I went back to the Philippines, to the province where my family lived (basically the countryside) and there were so few garbage cans anywhere. Not that there wasn't garbage to be sure--they burned a lot of it which has its own environmental downsides--but there was much, much less there than here, because they recycled so much. In Cuba even moreso, there was so little garbage. I remember being in Santiago and even Havana, the two largest cities in Cuba, and being amazed at the lack of trash on the streets, even in the garbage cans that sat unused at the edge of plazas and sidewalks. When you don't have much, you don't waste things, you figure out other ways to use them. Cuba is the best example to me of a country that has survived, despite massive economic and political pressure from the US, by recycling and repurposing 'old' stuff. And they've not only survived--albeit on a level of tough struggle that I don't envy--they've been able to create beautiful works of automotive art out of salvaged cars and parts, maintain and evolve a rich musical heritage through the decades that includes music like son, 'salsa', reggaeton and Cuban hip hop, and become a popular tourist destination for people from the Global North who want to experience this amazing display of ingenuity, culture and resistance.

I'm rethinking how I can have less, waste less and therefore want less. It's no longer a way of life that I think we can decide to choose or not choose. By our past choices to waste and exploit and be greedy with the Earth's resources, we are quickly realizing that this new way of anti-waste is choosing us.