Slate has put together a magnificent compilation of some of Meryl Streep’s best accents but what I think of when I watch this is the astonishing range of the performances behind them. It is almost impossible to imagine that it is the same person playing the steely nun, the Holocaust survivor, the Australian mother accused of killing her child, the Danish writer, the barfly. Look at the difference between her portrayals of two women with Irish accents, one Irish, one Irish American. The stunning achievement of her performance as Julia Child is not the accent, or even her ability to appear to add six inches of height, but the way she creates a complete and true character within the larger-than-life and very caricature-able personal characteristics so familiar to so many people. It is a clever trick of writer/director Nora Ephron to include in “Julie & Julia” a clip of Dan Ackroyd’s “Saturday Night Live” parody of Child’s television persona as a compelling contrast to the subtle and endearing character Streep is able to create from the same raw material. Charlie Rose had a marvelous interview with Ephron and Streep about the film, where Ephron said that two of the movie’s best moments, so immediate and effective that both appear in the trailer, were both improvised by Streep. I was also very interested that Streep said she found it liberating when she decided her job was not to re-create the actual historical figure of Julia Child but to portray Child the way she was seen by blogger Julie Powell half a century later. This enabled her to bring in to the portrayal not just Child’s mannerisms but Streep’s own mother’s expansive and generous sense of joy.
I spoke to writer-director John Patrick Shanley, who has returned to film to direct his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Doubt.” Best known to film-goers as the Oscar-winning writer of “Moonstruck,” he has spent the past few years working in theater. “Doubt” is the story of a nun who accuses a priest of molesting a child and the movie, like the play, does not reveal which of them is telling the truth.
The film is set in 1964 and one of the striking differences is the very extreme and formal attire worn by the nuns in the movie, with big black bonnets. Where does that come from? They were in an order founded by Mother Seton. She was a married woman with five kids who took her husband to Italy. When he died there she took the mourning costume of an aristocratic woman, including the black bonnet and black habit. Our costume designer, Ann Roth went back to the Sisters of Charity to get the details right, even though they no longer wear it. It is quite elaborate and constricting and has no zippers. And it is an incredibly beautiful frame for the face, almost like a Dutch master, with a deep feeling of period.
You have written for both theater and movies. How do you think differently about story-telling as you change mediums? Theater is highly stylized and pared down to bare essentials for financial and aesthetic reasons. Look at older plays like “Of Mice and Men,” “The Miracle Worker” — older plays have like twenty people but “Doubt” has four. Adapting it was daunting, but also liberating. I thought, “Oh, now I can show the kids in the classroom, the nuns in the convent, the way they live, the neighborhood that feeds the congregation.” It was organic and natural to extend the perimeter.
What is it like to direct acting powerhouses like your cast in this film, especially when you had such strong performances by very different performers on stage? Meryl Streep is feisty, very creative, very playful, like a very feisty cat. She is very mentally rigorous and she lives in a wide imagination. Working with her and Philip Seymour Hoffman together was great. This is the third thing they’ve done together. They have a real rapport and work in a similar way. She is always trying to get the better of Phil and he’s amused and protective. Then there is Amy Adams. Her character’s kind of a ping pong ball batted between them and Phil and Meryl tugged over her.
What was the advantage of setting the story in the past? Two years after the story was set the nuns were no longer wearing those habits, kids were not acting that way, the Bronx was in flames. The change that was coming was extraordinary and not good. The person trying to keep the future from coming is the short-sighted one in our tradition and the other is progressive. But that is not always true. If you’re a tailor in 1931, trying to keep the future at bay is not a bad thing. In the Bronx of 1964 it would not have been a bad thing.
Why have the nun’s character reveal that she had been married? The founder of the order was married and had five children. We all make assumptions about what nuns are like, but as the story goes on your assumptions are called into question and you have to say “There’s more to this person than my mental shorthand allows for.” That’s my intention, as the story goes on, to make you take your assumptions and look at them, to say “My assumptions are not going to carry me through this movie.”
Do you think parochial school can be good for kids? I don’t see anything wrong with parochial school. I went to Cardinal Spellman. They threw me out. Later they were bragging that I’d gone there, so I started putting in my bio that they threw me out. I went up there to visit and I was very impressed. The student body is 90% black, there is so much spirit, it is so terrific, the educators are so committed – I started to send them a check. Talk about full circle! I couldn’t pass any of my subjects. It was just not the right place for me. I have two sons, one doesn’t respond to structure at all and the other one does.
The title of the movie refers not just to the questions of doubt and certainty and questioning assumptions of the characters but of the audience as well. Do people ever come up to you and say, “Come on, you can tell me, did he do it?” That comes up a lot, that’s understandable. People are preconditioned. If the question is whether the guy is going to get the girl, at the end of the movie you answer the question. But that is not most people’s experience of life, unsettled questions. Giving an answer is satisfying but simplistic, just a punch line. I want more than anything else for people to start talking to each other again, a real discourse. Any small part that this movie can do to make that happen is a good thing. People are not affected by things other people say any more. People are exhausted by that. There is a hunger for a real exchange; we have to get back together as a community and that means communicating with each other. We’re living in a time that is so balkanized. The identity of the West is so in transformation from the influx of all these kinds of people from all nationalities and religions side by side by side, the oddest ship of fools imaginable. Defining commonality is a long process. We are interconnected and in each other’s face and up each others coats, cross-pollinating in a way the world has never seen. We are establishing commonalities, banding together in cafés, reconvening at the café level, cooking like a mad soup, reaching out through the internet. Maybe it is all Gnostic, just between the individual and the divine. People have a desperate hunger for community and communal worship.
There are people who care so passionately about something that it fills them up completely. And then there are the rest of us, who can never lose themselves that way, people who divide their interest and attention and always hold a little bit of themselves back to observe and judge.
“Adaptation,” like the book that inspired it, is about both kinds of people and the way that each sometimes longs to be in the other category. The book is The Orchid Thief by New Yorker author Susan Orlean. By nature, by culture — by definition — a writer is at the furthest end of the scale in the observer/judge category. Orlean begins to write about Lohn Laroche, a man who even by the fevered standards of those utterly captured by “orchidelerium” is utterly obsessed. She realizes that she is not just writing about Laroche or about orchids but about the nature of obsession itself. In a way, she becomes obsessed with obsession.
The main character in the movie becomes obsessed with Susan Orlean’s obsession with John Laroche’s obsession with orchids. He is Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage), the Hollywood screenwriter hired to adapt Orlean’s book for the screen.
The real-life Kaufman wrote the beguilingly twisted “Being John Malcovich” and the all-but-unseen “Human Nature.” The movie opens with Kaufman’s attack of insecurity as he meets with a producer to discuss The Orchid Thief. As he struggles to adapt it, his self-doubt, underscored by the contrast with his confident identical twin brother Donald (also played by Cage) becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle. But the real obstacle is not his weakness, but his strength. While his brother casually dashes off a ludicrous screenplay about a serial killer with multiple personalities, utterly unconcerned about issues like consistency, Charlie agonizes about the imperviousness of Orlean’s book to adaptation. Finally, he decides that he movie should be about that problem, and he proceeds with such girl-on-a-ketchup-bottle-with-a-picture-of-a-girl-on-a-ketchup-bottle thoroughness that in the opening moments, the screenplay is credited to both (the real-life) Charlie and (the fictional) Donald.
Like “Malcovich,” this movie has moments of bizarre humor in the context of profound and genuine questions about identity, inversion, inspiration, obsession, and meaning and meta-meaning and meta-meta-meaning. Kaufman loves writing for the same reason Laroche loves the orchids — for their difficulty and fragility. It has some sharp Hollywood satire and some wildy funny plot twists. This is the kind of movie that makes fun of emotional turning points inspired by platitudes but then, when it throws one in (in the middle of a jungle environment that is real and symbolic), it’s a very nice one: “You are what you love, not what loves you.”
The performances are marvelous, particularly Meryl Streep as Orlean and Chris Cooper as Laroche. Ron Livingston’s performance as Charlie’s agent is a small comic gem, Brian Cox is masterful as a screenwriting expert, and Judy Greer is radiant as an orchid-loving, pie-serving waitress.
Parents should know that the movie has very mature material, including very strong language, brief nudity, sexual references and situations (including masturbation and a porn website), drinking, smoking, and drug use. There is a brief but very explicit scene of a baby being born. The movie has quasi-comic violence, but characters are injured and killed. Characters break the law, including stealing from nature preserves and making psychotropic drugs.
Families who see this movie should talk about how we chose our passions – or whether they choose us. Do Laroche and Orlean envy each other? Does Charlie envy Donald? Why did Charlie the real-life screenwriter divide himself in two in the movie portrayal? Why did he take real-life characters like Susan Orlean and John Laroche and have their movie characters do things that they never did? What do you learn from Laroche’s reason for not fixing his teeth? If you were going to re-create yourself as a movie character, what would you write? This movie both uses and makes fun of many movie conventions – which ones did you spot?
Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy seeing “Being John Malcovich” (very mature material) and other dark movies about Hollywood like “Day of the Locust” and “The Player.” They might also enjoy Cage in the face-switching movie “Face Off” and some other twin movies like “A Stolen Life” and “The Parent Trap.”
Based on Anna Quindlen’s novel, this is the story of a young writer who learns the value of her mother when she goes to care for her during her treatment for cancer. Renee Zellweger plays Ellen Gulden, a New York Magazine writer who has always rejected her mother’s homey values to follow the career of her father, a distinguished literary critic, professor, and author. As Ellen cares for her mother, she finds that her father is less than she thought, and her mother is more. In understanding and accepting her parents as fully human, Ellen begins to be more fully human herself. She gains an appreciation for her mother’s strength. The community and domestic projects Ellen had seen as unimportant busywork she learns to see as an essential source of sustenance. Meryl Streep shines as Ellen’s mother Kate, not afraid to show us the irritating side of Kate’s sunny personality and the impatience she reveals as she acknowledges that she has to insist on her opportunity to talk about what is important to her before it is too late. William Hurt plays Ellen’s father George. He show us that his hypocricy comes from weakness, insecurity, and fear, in a way harder for Ellen to take than if it had been based only on selfishness.
Parental concerns include the brief profanity that earns this film an R rating as well as intense and disturbing scenes concerning Kate’s illness and the issue of euthanasia. The movie probably will not have much appeal for teens, who are seldom ready to consider their parents as fully human, but those who want to see it may come away with a better appreciation for the complexity of relationships and the diversity of accomplishments.
