The Shadow of a Doubt

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.

 

 

 

This Lady in Distress . . . is a Mess (“The Woman in the Window”)

Here’s a recipe for a hit movie: take a hot-selling thriller, part of the always-appealing “damsel in distress” genre, then add the choicest ingredients. Like an admired director (Joe Wright of Atonement fame), a screenwriter with a Pulitzer Prize to his credit (Tracy Letts, who also plays a key supporting role), and a full compliment of skilled craftspeople. Then stir in an A-level cast, including Oscar winners like Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore, headed by the always zesty Amy Adams. On top, drizzle a typically tangy Danny Elfman score. Serve luke-warm.

 I’m being facetious, of course, The most startling aspect of The Woman in the Window  is how many talented people contributed to what turns out to be a dish of leftovers. I haven’t read the popular novel, but the film wants to resemble something by Hitchcock, to the extent of borrowing telling shots from such classics as Vertigo and Rear Window. The plot borrows shamelessly from Rear Window too, combining the idea of a housebound person who witnesses (or maybe witnesses) a crime in the house across the way with that old chestnut: the lady in jeopardy. Since the very beginning of Hollywood, viewers have been titillated by flicks in which a lone female, under the direst of circumstances, must fight for her life against a home invader. See, for example, Barbara Stanwyck as a bed-ridden invalid in 1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number. Sixteen years later, it was Olivia de Havilland trapped in a home elevator in Lady in a Cage. Even in this century the trope has persisted: see Jodi Foster in 2002’s Panic Room. It can be argued that these films are a tribute to female strength in times of adversity: even the weakest, sickliest woman can rise to the occasion when circumstances demand. But The Woman in the Window starts with a woman who’s such a physical and psychological wreck that her eventual heroics are neither convincing nor interesting.

 Adams, who was also a painfully hot mess in last year’s Hillbilly Elegy, here plays a child psychologist with a broken family and severe agoraphobia. She takes plenty of meds (washed down with red wine) and has weekly visits from a shrink who makes house calls. And she’s obsessed with the new family across the street from her elaborately creepy Upper Manhattan townhouse. After visits from the weird mother (Moore) and weirder son (Fred Hechinger), she becomes convinced that the father of the family (Oldman) is a killer who’s going to strike again. Alas, no authority figure believes her, especially because there are some gaping holes in the story she tells of her own life. But wait! Why do disturbingly close-up photos of her in bed surface in her email? Maybe something evil DOES this way come. But maybe–just maybe—it’s not the person she suspects.

 In Act 3 of this creaky melodrama, there’s the inevitable (and almost endless) fight to the finish. After which a battered and bruised Adams, now cured of her agoraphobia, finally takes off her frumpy bathrobe and blossoms into a strong, whole woman ready to move out of her house of horrors and take on the world. I’m told this film was scheduled for a theatrical release, until the pandemic led it to be presented on Netflix. Under COVID conditions, a TV movie focusing on someone stuck inside makes a grim sort of sense. But frankly, I don’t choose to be confined with the whiny, dreary folks who make up this cast. The New York Times review of this film came up with a nifty headline: “Don’t You Be My Neighbor.”

 

Little Boys Blue: “Wildlife” and “Hillbilly Elegy”

There’s nothing especially fresh about stories in which a sensitive young boy watches in quiet dismay as his family disintegrates all around him. Over the years there’ve been films galore on this subject. Like, for instance, 1941’s How Green Was My Valley, in which the family unit is destroyed by social forces and the exploitation of the land. In other films, personal weaknesses outflank social issues as the chief cause of the family’s failure to thrive. I’ve just seen two of these, both made quite recently.

Hillbilly Elegy, based on J.D. Vance’s popular memoir, is the latest release in the long line of work from director Ron Howard. Howard’s sensitivity toward actors is well known, as is his interest in the rural South, stemming from his own childhood portrayal of Opie from Mayberry on TV’s classic The Andy Griffith Show. I have not read Vance’s memoir, which traces his journey from Appalachia to Yale Law, but it apparently has a strong (and controversial) political bent, playing up the forces that contribute to the dark side of the American Dream.  In Howard’s hands, though, this is chiefly a multi-generational saga in which loyalty to the family unit is overridden by drug abuse and other horrors. We know that young J.D.’s mother Bev, once a nurse, is hopelessly addicted to opioids, and has even ventured into heroin. We know that as J.D. grows up he’s appalled by her behavior, at the same time that he glorifies his feisty salt-of-the-earth granny, Mamaw. But Mamaw is no saint, particularly when she signals her fury by setting Papaw on fire (!). Frankly, I didn’t see much onscreen motivation for any of this, no particular reason why these people are in this kind of psychic pain.

 The screenplay cuts between the young J.D. and his grown-up self, courting a gorgeous Indian-American and trying to make a good impression on big-league Washington law firms. Drawn from a select dinner party (he worries over which fork to use) straight back to the old homestead, he has to confront his mother’s full-blown overdose. That hot mess of a mother is played by Amy Adams (still looking for her first Oscar win). And playing the indomitable Mamaw is a transformed version of Glenn Close (still looking for her first Oscar win). The usually elegant Close now shows off a dumpy figure, frizzy salt-and-pepper hair, a foul mouth, and an ever-present cigarette. Sounds like Oscar bait to me.

 A smaller, more delicate project is 2018’s Wildlife, based on a novel by Richard Ford. It was adapted for the screen by actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan, with Dano making his directorial debut. The heartland family unit at the center of the drama consists of father Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), mother Jeanette (Carey Mulligan, spectacularly good), and son Joe. Jerry seems like a nice guy, but also someone who’s never grown up. Having lost yet another job, he gets it into his head to join a team of firefighters, risking their lives for a pittance to put out a stubborn mountain blaze nearby. In his absence, Jeanette evolves from a sweet, supportive wife into someone determined to make her own way in the world. This includes getting her own job, and then cozying up to a wealthy older man who adores her. Meanwhile poor young Joe stands by, trying desperately to keep his parents’ relationship intact.

 It’s a hugely sad but totally convincing portrait of a marriage splitting apart at the seams. Dano and Kazan, who starred together in another of their projects, the hilarious Ruby Sparks, deserve all the kudos they can get.