The Last Movies I Saw

The last two films I saw over my holiday break in WNY were Clint Eastwood's Changeling and John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. Both continued my run of good movies seen, which lasted the length of my vacation, though that probably has more to do with it being "awards" season when the studios trot out their best for consideration at the Oscars, Golden Globes, etc. In other words, I had a lot of good films to choose from, and never felt tempted to see something just to be seeing something (which does happen to me on occasion when I just want to watch a movie).

Anyway, I enjoyed both of these films, which once again turned to some degree on a common element-- the faith placed in traditional figures of authority. In Changeling, it's the police, who assert a rather brazen contempt for anyone who questions their version of the facts. When its violent criminals who challenge them, well, maybe the cops do deserve the benefit of the doubt; but when it's a mother who claims the child returned to her is not the son who was abducted, that's another story. There's some really fine period detail in the film, and although Angelina Jolie overacts (I think) a bit in the early scenes immediately following the abduction, for the most part she gives a solid, sympathetic portrayal. The rest of the cast, virtually all of whom are unfamiliar names (though not necessarily faces), is stellar, which I suspect ultimately helped keep Jolie from completely going over the top (though Eastwood generally keeps all his actors on an even keel, so maybe that was the key factor). The story unfolds at a deliberate pace, allowing considerable identification with several of the characters, so that each becomes fleshed out enough for us to fully grasp the defining qualities of their nature, which makes their subsequent actions appear natural and somewhat inevitable even as we know they are fruitless or an outright mistake. Needless to say, that adds to the tragedy of the story.

In Doubt, it's the authority of religious faith and the paternalistic hierarchy of the Catholic church (far from the same thing, as posited in this story) that comes into question. The pretext for the story is taken from all too frequent recent headlines, but that is only a pretext. The conflict arises from one nun's unshakable belief that a parish priest has done something wrong, and the priest's efforts to maintain some degree of privacy (for himself and a schoolboy) that may or may not involve inappropriate behavior. The movie (which originated as a play, and it kind of shows) plays with the audience's sympathies which are only somewhat motivated by the strict facts of the narrative. Certainly a contemporary audience would know something of the events widely reported over the past few years, and perhaps be inclined to believe the worst about the priest. But the performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep as the accused and accuser generally serve to draw one's sympathy to the former (he's a good guy and she's a bit of a shrew)-- which makes the viewer wonder to what degree they're being played, which I suppose we are. But if you accept that the subject here is not molestation, but the means by which we arrive at and perpetuate our beliefs, spiritual or otherwise, then it makes for a keenly engineered exercise demonstrating the validity of skepticism. It would have packed more of a wallop if it could have engaged the soul as much as the mind (and maybe that was more my personal shortcoming than the film-maker's), but even so it's something of a rarity in American movies, prompting thought instead of just visceral gratification.