I have no doubt that Harvey Weinstein deserves his long
prison term for multiple sexual offenses
It’s shocking to me that a man with such a strong creative vision could
behave so badly toward women over whom he had professional power. I would never
ever dream of campaigning for his early release. Still, I look back fondly on
the glory years of Miramax, the production and distribution company named after
his and brother Bob’s parents, Max and Miriam. Miramax (which was founded in
1979 as an independent company but later became part of the Disney empire) took
artistic chances on films that were thoughtful and sometimes bold. Like, in the
early days, Pulp Fiction; sex, lies, and videotape; The Crying
Game; Heavenly Creatures; and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in
Love. Today I miss the richness of popular English-language films like
these.
A later Miramax hit was Doubt (2008), based on a Pulitzer
Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley. The 2004 stage play, set almost
entirely within the walls of a Catholic church and parish school, featured only
four actors. As the film’s director, Shanley opened up the story to include the
down-to-earth Bronx neighborhood in which St. Nicholas is located. And he
enlisted four of Hollywood’s finest actors: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour
Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis, all of whom were subsequently recognized
with Oscar nominations for their roles. Shanley was nominated for his adapted
screenplay too, but the Doubt won not a single statuette. (It was the
year of Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, The Reader, and Milk.
And Doubt, for all its artistic merit, was perhaps not a film that
generated love.)
Doubt (the stage version is titled Doubt: A Parable)
is at base a clash between two powerful opposing figures. Father Brendan Flynn
(Hoffman) is a youngish and liberal-minded cleric who’s respected within the
church community. His take-no-prisoners adversary is the school’s principal,
Sister Aloysius (Streep), who is zealous in enforcing her version of the truth.
Prim and grim, she is a far cry from Streep’s glamorous Miranda Priestly in The
Devil Wears Prada (2006), though in both films she wields power with an
iron fist. (Miranda Priestly would not be caught dead wearing that terrible
Sisters of Charity bonnet.) The clash between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn
evolves out of the priest’s apparently unorthodox friendship with the school’s
single Black student, a young boy named Donald Miller. Aloysius sees nothing
but evil in this boy-and-priest connection, and passes her suspicions on to the
innocent but eager young nun played by Amy Adams. The highlight of the drama on
both stage and screen is a confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Donald’s
mother (Davis), who turns out to have her own unexpected reasons for accepting
her son’s connection with the priest, whether or not it violates social and
religious taboos.
In some ways, Doubt is a story of the dangers of
zealotry. Sister Aloysius herself admits that “in the pursuit of wrongdoing,
one steps away from God." This view is reinforced by a late-in-the-film
revelation that makes us further question Aloysius’s dominant role in this
community. That being said, this is a work that (appropriately enough) ends
with questions, not answers. I’ve read that the original 90-minute stage
version generated an informal “second act” in which exiting theatregoers argued
with one another about their interpretation of the events they’d seen play out
on stage. The ending of the film is equally ambiguous—and well worth
discussing.
Too bad I can’t feel ambiguous about the guilt of Harvey
Weinstein. But he surely knew how to produce a damn good movie.
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