Doubt doesn't seem to be making many best movie awards lists this season, and I am not sure why. I thought the movie was great. Granted, I have not seen all the major movies yet, but this is the best movie I've seen this year. Meryl Streep is just the best actor out there. Period. She so completely turns herself into my seventh grade math teacher, Sister Helen Maguire, that I kinda got a little nauseous. Sister Helen was the single scariest person I have ever met in my life. She required us to bring a number 2 pencil into class with us every da
y, and she would call us up to her desk, row by row, to inspect our pencils and our work. One day, my friend Frankie forgot his. I had an extra, but it was unsharpened. As Sister Helen started calling the rows up, Frankie panicked. He was in the fourth row. Sweating and starting to foam at the mouth, he took the unsharpened pencil and chewed the end until it was sharp enough to write. It worked. Frankie lived to see another day. Meryl Streep brought me back completely to that time.Doubt is about a stern nun who is a principal at a Catholic school in the sixties. She suspects that the parish priest, a popular, jovial fellow played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is screwing around with one of the male students. The movie seems to take the side of the priest, making you like the priest and dislike the nun. The high point of the movie is when Streep and Seymour Hoffman go toe to toe, with their verbal battles being better than most action films these days.
This wouldn't be a Brother's Keeper movie review if I just thought about the actual movie and plot. I was mesmerized by Phillip Seymour Hoffman's long fingernails. The movie actually uses it as a plot point. WTF?!?! Seriously, they show his long fingernails and he talks about them a couple times. Doubt makes us look at Hoffman's chubby hands and sausage fingers up close, so that we can see these gross fingernails. The playwright / director has a fetish and it makes me feel all gross inside. Also, there is a great performance by Viola Davis as the boy's mother. She is phenomenal. The most phenomenal thing about her acting is how she is able to control the snot dripping out of her nose while she's speaking. Her nose is running and clearly featured in a scene. The runny ooze comes out just perfectly to right above her lip and stops there. She then gives the performance of her life. I don't know about you but having a runny snot on my upper lip is the most annoying thing in the universe. I must wipe it off immediately. (In fact, I would have used Hoffman's long fingernails to knock the snot off.) Not Viola Davis. She is able to give an Oscar worthy performance with gooey boogers on her lip. Fantastic.
Go see Doubt. It's a great movie. By the way, as scary as Sister Helen was, she was an excellent teacher, and she kept her fingernails neatly trimmed.
4 comments:
That last line about Sister Helen is priceless. Good work.
I doubt the long fingernails are a fetish on the part of the director. Possibly it's symbolic of getting away with something nasty so long as you keep it "clean."
There was also a scene where he asked a boy if he had washed his hands that day (outside the schoolyard).
The figernail theories can argue for or against also with "Cleanliness is next to Godliness."
I have my doubts this movie was worth watching after seeing it. Streep did very well acting though (as expected).
Fingernails - it's the old saying of "one hand washes the other." Molesting little boys, but helping them as well -- or in the case of Sister Helen, lying and entertaining rumors on scant evidence in order to protect the children from a possible predator. So it's okay if you have long nasty fingernails, as long as you wash them and keep the dirt out.
Post a Comment