No Doubt about it: writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s commentary track makes his film of his hit play a more satisfying experience the second time around. Not that it was entirely unsatisfying when I saw it on my Oscar-watching rounds; Shanley’s adapted screenplay was nominated, as were all four of its principal actors, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis. But even if you hadn’t seen the Broadway production, the movie might have left you scratching your head, wondering why the show had won the top Tony and Drama Desk awards, and the Pulitzer Prize to boot, in 2005.
Going from stage to screen is always a tricky business. Some plays, like Frost/Nixon, are naturally cinematic, and lend themselves well to their new home on celluloid. (A shame it couldn’t draw audiences, which its April 21 DVD release will I hope correct.) Some just get lost in translation: With its original cast pretty much intact, and the show’s playwright and director retained, I thought The History Boys couldn’t miss as a movie, but a lively theatrical production was history on screen. Doubt doesn’t suffer near as badly. The show’s strong spine is there. It has, however, been padded, though Shanley, we learn, had his reasons.
Onstage, Doubt is simplicity itself, whittled away to a knife-edge of near-abstraction. The one-act, 90-minute show, set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, features just that quartet of characters. The starchy Sister Aloysius (Streep), for whom everything is black-and-white, refuses to see any gray areas in an apparently compromising situation between the more liberal and charismatic Father Flynn (Hoffman) and the institution’s first African-American pupil. Situated uneasily between them is a naïve and good-hearted young teacher, Sister James (Adams), who reports on Flynn’s conduct to Aloysius but tries to remain neutral as their war of wills escalates. Aloysius, who wants Flynn out of her school, thinks she has a natural ally in the boy’s mother, Mrs. Miller (Davis)—and is forced to change tactics in the piece’s most surprising scene. On several levels, doubt creeps in. (more…)
“But you’re in Mariah Carey’s new video for ‘Touch My Body,’” I reminded him. “I saw it advertised on VH1 at the end of February, and I watched it on YouTube just the other day. Don’t worry. Everything’ll be alright.”