Well, I can honestly say that I never thought I would be one of "those" people. You know, those blogging people, what with their scarves and their lattes!
But somehow, by some strange and undoubtedly cruel fate, here I am. I've got my scarf. I've got my latte. Let's do this thing.
So, what should one talk about in their first blog post ever? Maybe I should talk about myself, give some background information on who I am and why I'm the sort of person who has been known to to do things like spontaneously create blogs.
That seems like a suitable subject, but Blogger.com has thought ahead and provided a little section to our right whose soul purpose is to provide that sort of information. And who am I to rob that box of its purpose? If that box happened to be some sort of existentialist and I took away its only job, I would pretty much be ruining its little box life. I just couldn't live with myself.
What I'm going to talk about is the movie Doubt. I'm going to talk about how mind-blowingly fantastic it could have been, and how disappointing it actually was.
First, a little synopsis from Fandango.com: "When the principal (Meryl Streep) of a Bronx Catholic High School accuses a popular priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of pedophilia, a young nun caught in between the feuding pair becomes hopelessly swept up in the ensuing controversy."
And the trailer on YouTube.
Let me start out by saying that both the synopsis from Fandango and the trailer are more moving and emotion-filled than the film was. Yeah, I'm not kidding.
The literary quality of the film is FABULOUS. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play, and believe me, nothing has ever deserved a Pulitzer more. The script is rich with symbolism and conflict. Oh, such conflict! The point of the film isn't so much to examine whether or not Hoffman's character did or did not sexually abuse a little boy. It's to look at the do-or-die conflict of Doubt vs. Certainty. It is so very, deliciously thematic.
The acting is incredible. Hoffman (whom, for whatever reason, I've got a bit of a crush on after seeing The Savages) is a wonderfully enraged victim to Streep's character, who is all at once terrifying and hilarious. Amy Adams is once again adorably innocuous and naive, but believably so. The direction was strong, though there were a few straight-out-of-film-school camera angles that were a little annoying (an example of which can be seen in the trailer at 1:03), but that can be forgiven.
On the outside, it seems as if this film has everything it needs to be awe-inspiring. So what made it fall short?
You see, the film was written for screen and directed by the same man who wrote the play, John Patrick Shanley. He did not change the play for film, and that was the biggest mistake he could have made.
In plays, one can get by without constructing a character to whom the audience can connect. In just about any theater, all audience members will never be more than, say, 400 feet from an actor. This makes it so that the characters don't necessarily have to be accesible. The characters are right in front of you, you can almost touch them. In film, this is not true. An audience has to be given a character who they can imagine existing in real life. If a story has one character that can do this, the entire story becomes real for the audience and thus has the power to either be devastating or uplifting.
Doubt did not have that character. So, where I could have been completely devastated, I was only mildly intrigued. I enjoyed the film, but only on an intellectual level, not an emotional one.
I guess I'll just have to hope that Revolutionary Road and Frost/Nixon are more to my liking.
