You Know You Make Me Wanna Doubt

Before Congress nationalizes Meryl Streep's half-manifested viper grin and ennui-flavored lilting delivery as valuable resources that the U.S. economy depends upon, let's consider her in that piece of Oscar bait, Doubt.

Like supersoldiers bred in the laboratory of a 50s comic book, these Oscar movies lurch into the multiplex every year, tricked out with the same old features, extending their meaty hands to receive the prizes they know they deserve. They're often set in the past and shot "sumptuously" to catch all those golden English Patient-y rays of archaic sunshine dripping onto fedoras and flapper hats. Ralph Fiennes is often involved, popping up like a goddamn mushroom in the rain-soaked grass. These movies will often be based on works of a more "serious" medium, a novel or a play, and, to make sure that not even the stupidest Hollywood goon can fail to see how important it is, some mass murder or historical injustice is alluded to. Did I say "alluded to"? Sorry, I meant spritzed into your eye-sockets like mace. If any jokes are allowed in the movie, they're always in the shadow of some blimp-sized irony, because humor is not serious, only solemnity is, and seeing a flick should feel like chugging a whole gravy boat of big themes.

(There's something about the blog medium, don't you think, that encourages you to denounce things, to wail on, for example, some poor 70s rock band until your golf club's all bent out of shape and you're panting harder than you ever have since high school gym.)

Doubt isn't as bad as all that. But it suffered from being a filmed play, instead of a movie. Well, it was and is a play. The playwright directed the movie, and I wonder if that was the best move. Can you trust someone to hack his play to pieces in order to make it work on screen? What I mean is: Non.

Most eukaryotic organisms already know that a stage actor is not a movie actor is not a t.v. actor. Just because you can do one medium doesn't mean you can do another. That might be because of the way you look or speak, or the fact that your face is projected to a scale of fifteen feet, but I got to thinking while watching Doubt that it might have something to do with the material itself. As you'd expect from a movie based on a play -- though how closely it's based I don't know -- scenes of dialogue go on for quite a while. Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Meryl Streep and Viola Davis. Alone with each other in dim rooms or on snowed-over benches. Like on an afternoon of speed dating, the bell rings and a new pair begins their meandering little confab.

Now, where I saw it, Meryl Streep's every menacing mouth-twist and eye-twinkle had the audience hooting with glee. (I don't want to slander the good people of Ballston, Virginia by saying that some of the laughs sounded a little forced, but, well, there you go.) She plays a strict nun, the principal of a parochial school. These are the sorts of performances that cause critics to say, "You can tell she had fun." Oh, those critics, such suckers for fun. But I couldn't help thinking she was out-Streeping Streep, piling on more nuance and suspense than her lines could support. Or maybe it was just that, well, there's no one more at home on celluloid than she is. Movies, with their cuts and relatively fast pacing, normally reward her kind of acting; here she came off as a ham, conveying a kind of self-consciousness that isn't the, uh, hallmark of tight-fisted school administrators. Can't blame her though. She wasn't in her natural habitat. An ecological lesson for us all.

(That's Deer Hunter Streep up top, by the way, before she learned to be so amused by her surroundings and the funny people floating around her like so much dandelion fluff.)