Short-form Reviews Turned Long: Doubt, Frost/Nixon

(So I was trying to write up both these movies for the side panel, and they ended up being so long that they bumped everything else off the main page. Thus, we try alternate text layouts.)

Anyways, as is my regular custom, the last two weeks of the year are easily the busiest I get as far as movies are concerned. The combination of freezing cold, Oscar contenders, and wild shopping stress make for the perfect time to hide for hours at a time in a darkened theater.

This last week I saw Frost/Nixon and Doubt on back to back nights. Their number of similarities are stunning, and they make for a good pair to review in tandem. It also doesn't hurt that both are near the top of my list of best movies this year (which totally isn't getting posted until January this year, because I am extraordinarily lazy right now).

The short-form reviews first:

Frost/Nixon - Tight, powerfully written and acted. The direction is... I guess competent is the word. Good, not great, and I take issue with a couple the devices that frame the whole movie (primarily the use of the documentary-style interviews to intercut tense in-the-moment scenes of action). Frank Langella is in the fight of the year in my mind right now for Best Actor with Sean Penn. Crazy, crazy good performance. Really, everyone brought it to this movie. Sam Rockwell was particularly great despite some tough, almost caricature-level lines to work with. I'd have to say the weakest link in the whole cast was Kevin Bacon, and that was more a failing of the script than the acting, since he had so few lines to develop a ton of character, and it just didn't come through.

Actually that's the only real quibble I have with the whole movie (besides the documentary interview thing - seriously that bugged me) - the way every character that was not Frost or Nixon basically was given a three line summary as characterization and then basically acted as a cardboard cutout through the rest of the movie. I understand that the movie needs focus, and it really is only about them, but I wish there could have been more depth on the sides.

Still, an excellent movie over all. Funny, dramatic, and interesting from start to finish.

Doubt - Grabs you early and never lets go. It's surprising, because the plot description doesn't sound like it would be that compelling. Head nun at a Catholic school suspects an inappropriate relationship between a boy and the local priest (who she already really dislikes). Frankly, it sounds like it would lead to nothing but scene after scene of religious moralizing and speechifying, which is the opposite of what I'm looking for in a movie. But the screenplay avoids almost all of that. Instead we get a real inspection of the nature of doubt and certainty, as played through three complex character-studies. It's unexpectedly enthralling.

I'll try not to gush too much on the acting, but yeah, it's ridiculous. Meryl Streep knocking down the stereotype of stereotypes as the head nun, evening out a characature into a person, by sheer will of personality, basically. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the one who does all the heavy lifting - making sure that everything stays in doubt throughout the whole movie, jumping from guilty to innocent just by the change of an expression. Without him, the movie could have been ruined. And even Amy Adams, who gets an absolute clunker of a character (she is officially type-cast and the naive optimistic one, after Junebug, Enchanted, and now this), manages to steal a few moments to shine, digging into the tiny allowances her part gives her to keep it from being as one-note as it might be.

And I haven't even gotten to Viola Davis, who gets two scenes and like 10 minutes of the movie, but owns the entire thing. Really, it's just unbelievable. I can't do it justice.

I'll go ahead and rail against the film for a while though - it's by no means a great movie. The direction is terrible. Terrible. Shots taken at an angle for no real reason, except to be arty. Heavy handed literal metaphors every other second. I can't stress that part enough - if you were able to go on the merits of acting and script, I would rate this among the best movies ever. As is, with the ham-fisted imagery and shot selection, it's going to drop so far down my list, I have a hard time keeping it in my top 5 this year without wincing. That's just unendingly depressing.

Still, possibly the most worthwhile viewing experience of this entire year (provided you have already gone to see Milk).

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Okay, so that was a complete lie, those reviews were like the opposite of short-form. But they get the individual parts out of the way so I can ramble on about their similarities. Both come from Tony winning plays, and it's very easy to see their roots. Frost/Nixon has the ultra powerful phone call scene, Doubt has both the rainstorm confrontation and the mother vs. nun revelation scene - all amazing things that are done without a spec of action, and are basically nothing but monologues or huge intercut speeches. Not that this is a bad thing (I love great theater) but sometimes it can take you out of the natural moment of the movie. Example: Nixon's phone call soliloquy is brilliant, but even in the character of Nixon (who is prone to rambling eloquence) it seems calculated. Langella gives it his all, for sure, and it comes very close, but you could tell the audience was drawn away from immediacy of the moment, and was instead stuck on the speech. It certainly did not help that Frost's response it basically the same as ours - slack-jawed astonishment.

The whole things is uniformly better handled in Doubt, although Hoffman comes very close to blowing it with all of his yelling at the high points of conflict. The speechy-ness is mostly relegated to natural moments (obviously you're supposed to speechify in a sermon) and the real tough stage-level moments are handled brilliantly (see: Viola Davis' revelations, and one flawless tiny moment by Amy Adams and a student). Keeping stage characters is shockingly difficult (see: any high school production of Shakespeare ever) but when it's handled well, it can give you shivers.

Allow me a small moment for a digression - one of my favorite movies in the entire world is The History Boys, something that fits right into the exact same category as these two movies: brilliant plays adapted to the screen with minimal changes. Just like Frost/Nixon they even kept the original cast intact. But where these two mostly succeeded in avoiding the speech and soliloquy trap that a play naturally entails, The History Boys seemed to revel in it. Just straight-up 'let's stop for a moment because I feel like giving a speech.' And it destroys the rhythm and sense of the movie. Which kills me, because even as-is I find it a completely brilliant, funny, and real experience. Massaged and worked on long enough, it might have been an amazing film on its own right. Instead, it's terrific writing and great scenes, that combine to form a clunky, wheezing machine of a movie.

Okay, diversion mostly over.

The real question that I was trying to get to was: which movie succeeds more? Or which one was better? Yeah, I'm still not sure which question I'm trying to answer. I think in the end, Frost/Nixon is more accomplished, but less important, so it wins on both of those counts, even if it loses the battle for the one that is most compelling.

Obviously, I have issues with the direction of Doubt, which lowers it in my mind, especially in terms of success. But I also take issue with the lack of real accomplishment in Frost/Nixon. Yes, the story is endlessly interesting, but mostly because it's a retelling of a real life event. It has its drama provided for it. I can't help but think that it enjoys far too much of a built in advantage, particularly when there is no real revelation in the execution - even the brilliance that Langella teases out of Nixon isn't unexpected, just interesting. Frost and his cohorts follow the lines, fulfill their underdog role, and the movie winds down. Similarly, this is why I'm so hard on Milk as far as the movie's greatness goes - the story is so fascinating that you wonder if the movie is getting a pass because the plot it's given is enough to carry you along.

Doubt is technically the lesser movie, but has better acting, and makes you think more. I'm not sure how to rate these things into a quantifiable scale. Eh, in the end I still don't have any good answers, but I still have time to mull it over before I come to any hard conclusions. I mean, the Oscars don't happen until like March, right? Plenty of time.