![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Apr. 9th, 2014 01:02 pm
Gan aon dabht
Back around the time of Philip Seymour Hoffman's untimely death, I loaded up the NetFlix queue with films of his I'd always meant to watch but hadn't gotten around to. We've been binge watching Veronica Mars lately but another hiccough in the deliveries (for reasons unknown, they took a newly-returned disc and mailed it right back to us) resulted in Doubt being sent as a bonus disc. I thought it would be too long for a school night, but actually the theatre release was only 104 minutes.
It's an outstanding piece of filmmaking all around. I haven't seen the play, but Shanley seems to have done an excellent job of opening it up, because I hardly detected any stageyness in the various scenes. At first, I thought it was a bit too clear where his sympathies lay, but he adds enough confusion that--unlike many screenwriters tackling similar material--he succeeds in making the situation genuinely ambiguous. About halfway through, it became clear to me that they weren't actually going to answer the question of "guilty or not?", and having accepted that I could ponder different interpretations with equanimity. The implications are fascinating either way.
Having such a strong plot makes the parochial school nostalgia much less cloying. It's great that Shanley was actually able to film at his old primary school in the Bronx. Of course it made me nostalgic for my urban parochial primary school in Richmond Heights. There's a scene where Meryl Streep's character goes on a rant against ballpoint pens--"I didn't even want to allow cartridge pens!" I laughed in recognition, remembering my fourth-grade teacher's insistence on teaching us to write with fountain pens for the sake of our penmanship[*].
Hoffman's character reminded me of all the "nice priests" I knew when I was younger. At that school, it was Father Hanson, who was a playful antidote to the fierceness of the white-haired pastor, Msgr Kennedy[**]. Watching him ride a bicycle once in his cassock was like a revelation, and I recall my surprise when he slipped a reference to The towering inferno into a talk he gave our class. This gave his farewell to the congregation added poignancy.
Of course, that's nothing compared to the kick it gets from the realisation that we'll never see Hoffman act again. In the supporting feature, Streep gushes about working with him, saying she hopes to do it again "thousands of times". I would've liked nothing better myself.
[*] I tried to cue up that scene for the Old Man, but the DVD was hopelessly screwed up: The menu chapters didn't correspond to the stated scenes in the film, and even when I tried skipping from one to another, it was unpredictable I finally gave up.
[**] By a not-unprecedented coincidence, the character had the same name--Father Flynn--as the pastor of our next parish. But he was a stodgy old-school model, replaced by friendly Father Don only after we'd moved back to the city.
It's an outstanding piece of filmmaking all around. I haven't seen the play, but Shanley seems to have done an excellent job of opening it up, because I hardly detected any stageyness in the various scenes. At first, I thought it was a bit too clear where his sympathies lay, but he adds enough confusion that--unlike many screenwriters tackling similar material--he succeeds in making the situation genuinely ambiguous. About halfway through, it became clear to me that they weren't actually going to answer the question of "guilty or not?", and having accepted that I could ponder different interpretations with equanimity. The implications are fascinating either way.
Having such a strong plot makes the parochial school nostalgia much less cloying. It's great that Shanley was actually able to film at his old primary school in the Bronx. Of course it made me nostalgic for my urban parochial primary school in Richmond Heights. There's a scene where Meryl Streep's character goes on a rant against ballpoint pens--"I didn't even want to allow cartridge pens!" I laughed in recognition, remembering my fourth-grade teacher's insistence on teaching us to write with fountain pens for the sake of our penmanship[*].
Hoffman's character reminded me of all the "nice priests" I knew when I was younger. At that school, it was Father Hanson, who was a playful antidote to the fierceness of the white-haired pastor, Msgr Kennedy[**]. Watching him ride a bicycle once in his cassock was like a revelation, and I recall my surprise when he slipped a reference to The towering inferno into a talk he gave our class. This gave his farewell to the congregation added poignancy.
Of course, that's nothing compared to the kick it gets from the realisation that we'll never see Hoffman act again. In the supporting feature, Streep gushes about working with him, saying she hopes to do it again "thousands of times". I would've liked nothing better myself.
[*] I tried to cue up that scene for the Old Man, but the DVD was hopelessly screwed up: The menu chapters didn't correspond to the stated scenes in the film, and even when I tried skipping from one to another, it was unpredictable I finally gave up.
[**] By a not-unprecedented coincidence, the character had the same name--Father Flynn--as the pastor of our next parish. But he was a stodgy old-school model, replaced by friendly Father Don only after we'd moved back to the city.