"Doubt"

"Doubt" is not quite an amazing movie, although it does have the two most amazing scenes from any movie all year. Weirdly, these two scenes are also the stagiest scenes in this stage adaptation - you can almost see the spotlight falling on the characters, at times. The themes are huge, the dialogues long and wandering, the faces of the fine actors relentlessly impassive - Meryl Streep is forced, by the material and by her own attention to detail, to give a horrendously over-the-top performance, with just a very few hints (including the devastating final line) that it's intentional. The film centers on the conflict between Meryl Streep's head nun and Philip Seymour Hoffman's head priest - she's the pre-Vatican II conservative, he's the progressive liberal who wants to bring some secular music into the chapel - and you can realistically watch the movie rooting for or against either of them.

Usually, after I see a movie that I don't like, my first instinct is to call it the worst movie ever, and my second instinct is to compare it to the movie I saw right before it. So it is that "Doubt" seems to provide the perfect explanation, as I think back on it, on why I so totally despised "Australia" a couple of nights ago. Nothing is worse for a movie than a silly, shallow, one-dimensional motivation. Almost every great movie is built upon a series of characters' wants and needs, and how those desires intersect and oppose each other. In great drama, and great comedy, every desire holds several different levels of meaning, some of them oppositional within themselves. So, in "The Great Gatsby," the title character claims to want Daisy, but also wants what Daisy represents (wealth, glitz, transcendance), and so his defeat comes not at the hands of a rival (although Daisy does not choose him), but rather, from Daisy herself - the object of his affection is also that affection's defeat.

Not every great dramatic desire need be so paradoxically frustrated, but consider an equally fascinating character from a more debased medium: on "The Wire," Jimmy McNulty is a cop trying to put criminals behind bars. On normal TV, cops do this because they want to protect innocent people; on "The Wire," McNulty does it because he wants to stuff his victory in the faces of his superiors, because he believes himself to be better than everyone else, because he enjoys the thrill of it, and because "chasing bad guys" allows him to justify his own perpetual immorality (ignoring his children, cheating on a wife and a girlfriend, drinking enough to fill Ireland.)

"Doubt" may tread heavily on overwrought themes, but in its best scenes, characters hold a number of ideas in their head, all at once. Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius claims that she's just protecting the children under her care; but, she also hates Hoffman's Father Flynn and wants him gone; and, more generally, she hates what Flynn stands for, the modern age, "Frosty the Snowman." On an even deeper level (and this comes purely from the actors), she may even be attracted to him. When characters claim to stand for something, but their actions prove different, one cannot help but be interested. This is why the underrated "Rome" may age better than any of its HBO contemporaries - it gave the impression of seeing behind the curtain of history, watching its characters sanitize their actions and remove dimensions from their own character.

This is why "Australia," I think, is such a particular bummer. Characters don't really have some deeper, hidden agenda - Nicole Kidman's love for the young half-caste boy in her charge spurs the entire latter half of the movie, and indeed, that love seems to inspire all of Australia (except for Evil Faramir) to de-racistize themselves. There is one scene where Kidman's and Jackman's characters actually seem to dig into each other's nature - it is the most clinical scene of the movie (both discuss their past marriages), but also the most romantic, and worth a million Luhrmann Technicolor sunsets.