November
6
Oscar Watch: Doubt Reviews
Let the fur fly. In the first review of Doubt, Todd McCarthy is casting seeds of doubt on Meryl Streep's performance.
Like Frost/Nixon, this play-to-screen adaptation is a small-scale period two-hander. The movie enjoyably pits Streep as a tough nun at a Bronx Catholic school against powerful priest Philip Seymour Hoffman. She thinks he's up to no good with a young black student. He thinks she has no basis to prove him wrong. Amy Adams is caught in the middle as a young, trusting nun. The great thing about the play--and the movie--is that we never know for sure who's right. Does the nun have the moral right to act on her instincts that the priest could do the child harm? John Patrick Shanley (who won an Oscar for writing Moonstruck) does a beautiful job of translating his play to the screen.
Oscar-wise, despite McCarthy's concerns about Streep--who definitely adds more nuance and character details to the role as written---the Academy actors should reward Streep for this, and Viola Davis in supporting, for just one bravura scene. With the actors behind it and impeccable production credits the movie is a strong contender, even though it's small, for best picture, adapted screenplay, actress, supporting actress, and music. Here's Pete Hammond.
Doubt's greatest strength is that it invites debate and discussion. I haven't had this much fun arguing about a movie since No Country for Old Men. Almost a year later, my post about that film's pesky ending is still generating comments.
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i read the stage play and was blown away by the ending. the movie does look good, but i hate the nuns' costumes, when i saw the previews, i was confused at first cos i thought the film was set in the 1600s or something. but i like Meryl Streep.
Posted by: UGLY PUNK GURL! | November 06, 2008 at 06:20 PM
Ditto. I live in the Bronx and have always lived here and I've had some interaction with Catholic schools here over the years and I've NEVER seen nuns dressed like that, not in the 1960s or ever since. I could'a mistaken this for that movie where Harrison Ford visits Amish Country (WITNESS).
Posted by: Brian | November 07, 2008 at 08:14 AM
Brian and Punk Ugly Girl,
FYI, if you've never seen nuns dressed as they are in DOUBT, then you've never seen a Sister of Charity of NY.
Unlike most congregations of Catholic Sisters who wore veils (which were worn by women from the time of Jesus and before, through the middle ages) the Sisters of Charity wore bonnets which reflect women's wear in the early 1800s. If you'd like to learn a bit more about how these sisters came to wear a bonnet, go to http://www.scny.org/pdf/Doubt_SCNY_FAQs.pdf which will open a PDF file with info on this.
Before the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, the Catholic Church required women religious to wear a habit to distinguished themselves from secular/lay persons. Just as nursing schools had different caps (when nurses wore white uniforms), congregations of Sisters had different headwear which ID'd their congregations at a glance.
The Sisters of Charity of New York established or staffed most of the parochial schools in the NYC area. In the Bronx alone, they were associated with ~ 14 elementary schools, several high schools, including Cardinal Spellman, St. Barnabas, St. Raymond, and the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the NW corner of the borough.
Christie
Posted by: Christie | December 12, 2008 at 08:11 AM
Christie, what you say may be true and I'm not in a position to dispute it--and I'm always eager to be corrected when I'm wrong--but I still find it hard to believe that this order had the reach that you describe. I can check with old neighborhood friends who went to Catholic schools in the Bronx, including some of the ones you list, and see what they remember. But I can assure you I never saw nuns dressed like that anywhere when I was growing up in the south-central Bronx of the 1960s.
Posted by: Brian | December 12, 2008 at 12:31 PM