In lieu of a decade in review type-piece about movies in February (the last decade was, like, a whole month ago!), I'll take the Oscar's newfound embracing of the top-10 format to do an all-decade Oscar list. Keeping in mind that I have my own standards in place, which I will defend if so asked. My all-Oscar nominees of the 2000s (winners in bold) is as follows:
Best Picture:
Dark Knight
Children of Men
Happy-Go-Lucky Hot Fuzz
Memento
Million Dollar Baby
No Country For Old Men
Ratatouille
The Squid And The Whale
Synechdoche, NY
Best Foreign Language Film:
2046
Barbarian Invasions
Counterfeiters
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Katyn
I Served The King Of England
Osama Pan's Labyrinth
Volver
The White Ribbon
Best Actor:
George Clooney - Up in The Air
Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp - Sweeney Todd
Paul Giamatti - Sideways
Ethan Hawke - Before Sunset Philip Seymour Hoffman - Capote
Richard Jenkins - The Visitor
Frank Langella - Frost/Nixon
Clive Owen - Children of Men
Tom Wilkinson - In The Bedroom
Best Actress:
Penelope Cruz - Volver
Rebecca Hall - Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Anne Hathaway - Rachel Getting Married
Sally Hawkins - Happy Go Lucky
Angelina Jolie - A Might Heart Laura Linney - You Can Count On Me
Ellen Page - Juno
Meryl Streep - Doubt
Naomi Watts - Mulholland Drive
Kate Winslet - Little Children
Best Supporting Actor:
Javier Bardem - No Country For Old Men
Michael Caine - Children of Men
Steve Coogan - Coffee and Cigarettes
Timothy Dalton/Jim Broadbent - Hot Fuzz
Paul Dano - There Will Be Blood
Morgan Freeman - Million Dollar Baby
Jackie Earle Haley - Little Children Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight
Jack Nicholson - The Departed
Michael Shannon - Revolutionary Road
Best Supporting Actress:
Cate Blanchett - Coffee and Cigarettes Penelope Cruz - Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Zooey Deschanel - Almost Famous
Eva Green - Dreamers
Kate Hudson - Almost Famous
Leslie Mann - Knocked Up
Meryl Streep - Adaptation
Marisa Thomei - In The Bedroom
Michelle Williams - Brokeback Mountain
Ziyi Zhang - Crouching Tiger
Best Direction:
Coen Brothers - No Country For Old Men
Alfonso Cuaron - Children of Men
Gullermo del Toro - Pan's Labyrinth
Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby
David Fincher - Zodiac
Ang Lee - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Chris Nolan - The Dark Knight
Martin Scorsese - The Departed
Steven Soderberg - Ocean's 11
Edgar Wright - Hot Fuzz
Best Original Screenplay:
Kelly Masterson - Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright - Hot Fuzz
Diablo Cody - Juno
Sophia Coppola - Lost In Translation
Woody Allen - Matchpoint
Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan - Memento Brad Bird - Ratatouille
Noah Baumbach - The Squid and The Whale
Seth Rogan & Evan Goldberg- Superbad
Charlie Kaufman - Synechdoche, New York
Best Adapted Screenplay:
Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman- Adaptation Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke - Before Sunset
Larry McMurty - Brokeback Mountain
Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J. Sexton - Children of Men
William Monahan - The Departed
John Patrick Shanley - Doubt
Michael Hanecke - Funny Games
Todd Field and Tom Perotta - Little Children
Brian Helgeland - Mystic River
Coen Brothers - No Country For Old Men
Best Special Effects:
Avatar
28 Days Later
The Dark Knight
Hot Fuzz
The Hurt Locker
Iron Man
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull The Lord of the Rings: Return Of The King
Pan's Labyrinth
Spider-Man 2
Best Documentary:
The Aristocrats
Bowling For Columbine
The Fog of War
The King of Kong
Kill Your Idols
Rize Sicko Spellbound
Sugar
Super Size Me
Best Use of Music (Soundtrack/Score)
24 Hour Party People
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
The Departed
Hot Fuzz
High Fidelity
Lost In Translation
Observe and Report
Ocean's 11
Slumdog Millionaire There Will Be Blood
(This review was originally published on Blogcritics)
What is Doubt about? Fundamentally, it’s not about anything particularly Catholic, or any mundane detail of the mortal world for that matter. That would be the “parable” side of the play’s original title Doubt: A Parable. Both the play and the movie are about a much more universal dilemma that plagues any system of beliefs: that certainty, or “faith,” is an emotion—a particularly strong one at that—that fundamentally concerns itself with factual matters. Rather than be a roadblock to certainty, doubt is actually what provides faith’s engine. A stronger, absolute conviction better allows you to avoid the pain of uncertainty, which, on a mortal level, is the pain of being alive.
That struggle is tested in a variety of ways by every character in Doubt (except for the gloriously ignorant children) as the possibility of a priest molestation case is raised. There’s no evidence for or against it, but the faith behind either point of view is absolute, irrefutable, and entirely a product of the circumstances. The fact that John Patrick Shanley could reduce that crisis of faith to characters—without making those characters archetypes—is what makes Doubt one of this generation’s greatest dramas. With everyone in both the theater and cinematic world worried about adapting the play to film, we should thank our lucky stars that, no matter what problems in adaptation take place, that core struggle is not lost in translation.
One of the inevitabilities of adapting the play to film is that the specific setting of Doubt will inevitably grow more dominant. That same problem turned the adaptation of Wit, another intellectually astute Pulitzer Prize winning play, into a film that would better be named Cancer. Here, John Patrick Shanley, who directs his own screenplay adaptation, turns Doubt into something of a post-Vatican II period piece. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is a hard-ass stereotypical Catholic school principal nun, and Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the hotshot, progressive young priest who smokes, takes three lumps of sugar with his tea, and most egregiously, writes with a ballpoint pen. To a modern day audience, the general politics will immediately endear the audience to Father Flynn.
More sinister, however, is the glaring political issue that won’t sway audiences against Flynn. Doubt’s feminist streak is almost impossible to ignore. It rings much stronger in the movie than the racial tension that was emphasized more strongly in the play. Despite a stunning one-off performance by Viola Davis as the mother of the boy in question, in the film of Doubt, Shanley lets the boy’s face in contrast to his peers do most of the talking. That frees up Shanley to focus on the much more fascinating gender dynamics of the Catholic church, which remained virtually unchanged even after Vatican II. The Church is still a patriarchy, and the nuns still have to answer to the old boys club of the pontificate. This emphasis turns Aloysius' campaign in Doubt into something of a feminist underdog story, where the beaten and outmatched nuns have to outwit the much stronger men. Like the first Rocky, the end result is a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Your sympathies in Doubt will inevitably be swayed by whichever character in the play you sympathize with the most. If you’re someone who has the ability to manipulate a situation, whether consciously or not, you will most likely think Father Flynn was blindly attacked. If, like me, you have no patience for manipulation and can’t stand even the hint of it, Aloysius is your girl. In fact, Aloysius represents everything some people wish they could say in a similar situation. If we did, however, we’d end up just as powerless as Aloysius ends up. To me, the debate over whether the molestation occurred—which has taken off in hyping the film—has the same streak as debating the woman’s role in acquaintance rape—it’s as if the circumstance, uncertainty and consequences of an accusation cause people to downplay the act’s heinousness.
The feminist side of the play is handled masterfully by Amy Adams and especially Meryl Streep, who by all accounts is on her way to yet another Oscar nomination at the very least. Adams deserves a supporting nod too, serving as an almost play-by-play conscience throughout the movie as the young, idealistic Sister James. At the beginning of the movie, she wakes up in a scene that may as well be an outtake from the Disney world side of Enchanted. By the end, she's much colder, worn out by the sleepless nights wrestling with struggles in her faith. Sister James’s development mirrors the transition from childhood to adulthood. Her transition from innocence (naïvete) to something harder (more practical) is something every reasonably intelligent person goes through in their lifetime. More so even than Enchanted, Adams looks like a fanciful heroine thrown into the harsh realities of the most definitely non-fanciful real world. Ultimately, however, Sister James is unable to fully accept those realities—she’s willing to give up peaceful sleep for her undying need to feel love.
Love does not enter into the equation for Streep’s Sister Aloysius, who buried her sense of compassion when she buried her husband during World War II. Streep’s Aloysius is one who “knows people,” which essentially means people’s weaknesses, temptations, and occasionally, evil. She can see right through Father Flynn’s ugly manipulations, and maintains her certainty without flinching throughout the film. I never thought I’d be able to see the role with anyone other than Cherry Jones at the helm, but Streep is as much a natural for this role as she is for any role she’s taken in years. Streep’s constant speech manipulations often overshadow her unparalleled ability to adapt to the body mannerisms and attitude of whatever role she takes. But Sister Aloysius is a role that plays to all her strengths: she commands authority, but is powerless against the patriarchy. She is absolutely steadfast in her righteousness, but still vulnerable to her past and her image among the school community. It’s her best performance of the decade, and I wouldn’t be afraid of saying it may be her best ever.
The one place where Streep falters, however is the moment where the play was most moving. After engrossing herself in a shut off, bitter state of mind, Streep can’t seem to handle Aloysius’s final breakdown, where she declares, “I has so many doubts! I have such, such doubts!” Forget August: Osage County’s “I’m running things now!”, Doubt’s last line is the greatest, most cathartic one-liner in American theater this decade. Here, Streep can't fully lets herself go without seeming artificial and forced. This cannot be blamed on Shanley’s direction; Streep’s too much of a professional not to be able to handle this herself. The larger issue, it seems, is that a line that boomed throughout an entire Broadway theater can’t resonate the same way to an audience divided from the action with a screen. Rather than blame some of the film's the flatness on Shanley, the cast, or the act of adapting the play, maybe we should blame these problems on the nature of film itself. Thankfully, those flaws are not enough to hold back this masterpiece of a story.Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley; based on his play; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Dylan Tichenor; music by Howard Shore; production designer, David Gropman; produced by Scott Rudin and Mark Roybal; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Photos by Andrew D. Schwartz.
WITH: Meryl Streep (Sister Aloysius Beauvier), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Father Brendan Flynn), Amy Adams (Sister James), Viola Davis (Mrs. Miller), Joseph Foster II (Donald Miller), Alice Drummond (Sister Veronica), Audrie Neenan (Sister Raymond), Susan Blommaert (Mrs. Carson), Carrie Preston (Christine Hurley) and John Costelloe (Warren Hurley).
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