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Daren in Brief - MOVIES ON A PLANE
by Daren Foster

Shakespeare on TV

Daren Foster PODCAST May 14th 2009

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Daren in Brief
Movies on a Plane

by Daren Foster

I travel a bit. Spend some time on those big ol’ jet aeroplanes, laying waste to the upper environs in order that future generations will be spared the discomfort and indignity of flying in commercial airplanes. (You’re welcome). I am not entirely comfortable 10 000 metres above the ground but I do like to travel. So you see the conflict inherent in my existence.

There has been a recent upgrade for those stuffed back in steerage on some planes and carriers that has made the process slightly less interminably unbearable. Your very own video screen right in the seat in front of you. Yes, it is small but there are enough movie choices on offer to occupy your time even on the longest flights humanly possible. They range in scope from the Silver Screen Classics to those not yet out on DVD and everything in between. Something for everyone the claim could be made. New Hollywood releases, World Cinema and access to more Canadian movies (at least on Air Canada) than most people might have at their nearest video store.

On a recent flight I decided to have a go at Doubt, last year’s multiple Oscar nominee starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. I run hot-and-cold with writer/director John Patrick Shanley. I liked Four Corners, was OK with Moonstruck (he won a screenplay Oscar for that), thought January Man was a complete waste of time and may well have been the only person in the entire world who liked Joe Versus the Volcano.

Doubt will definitely go down in the cold bin for me. The cold, cold, deep freeze, I’m turning blue, that kind of cold bin. An adaptation of Shanley’s Tony Award and Pulitzer prize winning play, maybe Doubt played better on stage than it did in the seat in front of me on the plane. Or maybe figuring moviegoers are a little bit thicker than theatre audiences, the filmmakers dumbed it down for us. Either way, Doubt the movie was little more than a pallid melodrama, talking and walking big thoughts but very rarely delving much below the surface on them. Try as hard as he might to open up the action, Shanley the director still couldn’t shake off the stagey feeling and the movie’s climax, such as it was, might as well have been delivered from under a proscenium arch with two actors simply mouthing the writer’s Big Thoughts.

Most of the actors did yeoman’s service trying to breath some life into the film with special mention going out to Viola Davis whose 2 scenes were devastatingly delivered. All combined, however, could not steal back the scenery from Meryl Streep. She was at her mannered worst and Shanley did little to rein her in. In fact, he seemed to encourage her excesses, taking the first 20 minutes of the movie to show over and over again how rigid and sadistic her character was. With her severe bonnet Streep’s Sister Aloysius Beauvier was one cackle away from Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West. So one note and over the top was her performance that her reversal at the end of Doubt felt completely inorganic and tacked on.

My verdict? Glad I didn’t drop money down to watch Doubt in the theatre or rent it on DVD and only had to pay $800 to see it on a plane.