oscar, please!
Each November, after Bond jets off for a dirty weekend with the one woman he hasn’t got killed on his latest adventure, comic book heroes are placed back in their draw and the studios roll out the big guns in preparation for Oscar season.
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Winter movies feature big actors tackling big issues, which means people cry. A lot. They’re upset, you see. About the big issues. The big issue in John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” adapted from his Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning play, is pedophilia in a Catholic grade school in the ‘60s. The big actors are Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep, serial winners who only come out of hibernation when the whiff of Oscar buzz breezes through the Hollywood smog. Hoffman plays Father Flynn, a new priest at a Bronx Catholic school whose forward-thinking methods are at odds with Streep’s stern principal Sister Aloysius, who believes even ballpoint pens to be an evil convenience of the modern world. When a young nun (played by a permanently petrified Amy Adams) suspects Flynn of molesting the school’s first black pupil, she voices her concerns to Sister Aloysius, who launches a campaign to have him, err, exposed. The film ticks all the boxes for Oscar fodder, with a tight script and tension throughout caused by both the weighty subject matter and Shanley’s claustrophobic, if slightly stagy, direction. Streep is magnificent as ever, sporting a fixed expression like she’s sucking on a lemon and challenging Flynn in a ridiculous Bronx accent. Hoffman holds his own during their scenes together, and is just so cuddly you can’t help but believe he is innocent. As far as those two are concerned, with nominations already in the bag, it’s job done, but “Doubt” certainly won’t be troubling the Academy in any other department. “Doubt” opens in Russia on Feb. 26. |
