NYT: 'Doubt' and Doubts of a Workingman
December 7, 2008
'Doubt' and Doubts of a Workingman
By DAVID CARR
WHEN John Patrick Shanley steps into a Midtown Manhattan hangout known for its theater clientele, few would guess how much he belonged.
There is little about his sure gait, workingman hands or no-nonsense affect that flicks at the artist within, let alone a playwright, often the more delicately wrought of the species. Only the eyes, weakened by glaucoma but working, suggest anything other than a tough guy from the Bronx. And in that gaze he is constantly calibrating everything around him, seeing a great deal and concluding not much.
“It’s an important part of my personality that I continually adjudicate, but I never reach a verdict,” he explains.
If Mr. Shanley, 58, more resembles a craftsman - the wizened, handsome contractor - it only makes sense. He builds stuff, including “Doubt,” a cultural artifact so sturdy that it not only became a Broadway achiever, winning a Tony for best play, but a film staring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman that is among the mentioned in this year’s Oscar race. By the way, he already has one of those for writing the 1987 film “Moonstruck.” He’s been building and telling stories for a while.
A former marine and the son of an Irish immigrant father from County Westmeath, he has a lot of other prosaic credits in his résumé, including working as a locksmith, a bartender and an elevator operator. He is, in conversation and approach, very much a product of the kind of hard-knocks Roman Catholic primary school that frames the moral dilemma of “Doubt.”
Mr. Shanley has little time for the niceties of the press ritual and simply orders a drink and waits for the interview to begin. He is not unresponsive or unhelpful to the needs at hand, but having just watched his play “Romantic Poetry” get mauled by critics, he knows the backside of the hand that would anoint his movie. He does not write things to be the toast of the town - he once described praise as a kind of heroin - he writes them because that is what he does.
“I’ve lived through all sorts of versions of it, where they love what you did and then when they cross the street when they see you coming,” he said, sipping a Campari. “The part when they cross the street is when you begin to understand Shakespeare. They hated this show that I did three weeks ago, so I don’t have to think back a long time. These things hurt me, they upset me, but they don’t stop me from what I’m doing.”
He relates this with a kind of practical evenness that few artists can muster when they talk about criticism. He worries the work, less how it lands.
“I was very frightened to do ‘Doubt’ as a film,” he said. “It’s a very serious story, and these people do nothing but talk. There’s only four people in the play, and how am I going to do this in a truly cinematic fashion?”
Like the play, the film “Doubt” (which Miramax opens on Friday) is a moral gunfight set in the Bronx in 1964 between Father Brendan Flynn, a charismatic priest with a common touch, and Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a principal with an uncommon certainty about the failings of the people around her. Sister Aloysius (played by Ms. Streep), finds herself compelled to challenge Father Flynn (Mr. Hoffman) after a young nun played by Amy Adams comes to suspect that the priest’s interest in Donald, the school’s first black pupil, is not altogether wholesome. Unlike in the play, the children are very much present and prevent the script’s lacerating verbal firefights from lapsing into abstraction. The fact that a boy’s future is at stake is rendered in a delicate minuet of class and race during a stroll by Ms. Streep and Viola Davis, as Donald’s mother.
To further open up what is a close-quarters debate in the play, Mr. Shanley renders his old neighborhood in detail, replete with the tableau of people going to church and sitting attentively as the words of Father Flynn land around them. And those words - the so-called pillow sermon from the play - are annotated with visual imagery.
Scott Rudin, who produced the film, said he had little hesitation in signing Mr. Shanley as the director to turn the play he wrote into a film, saying, “I know him very well, and I felt the material was personal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to anyone else.”
“I think that John is a first-class writer no matter what the form, who knows how to build a dramatic machine that is deeply satisfying to the audience,” Mr. Rudin said. “There is nothing postmodern about this movie. It is very pleasurably irony free and completely engages the big issues it is describing.”
One thing that did not change from stage to screen is that the audience still lands on the sidewalk afterward with a head full of questions and no certitude from the writer-director. At a party after a recent screening, a group of journalists and industry types who were well versed in the play veered into animated discussion about culpability, certainty and, yes, doubt. “Doubt” perseveres in part because at a time when the argument frequently goes to the loudest, the dilemma at the core of the film remains unresolved.
“You can’t know exactly what’s going on in your neighbor’s house or in his head or his heart,” Mr. Shanley said. “You can make suppositions, you can make assumptions, but you always have to factor in that you can’t know.”
For years Mr. Shanley has said the play was about the experience of someone he knew, but perhaps something about the intimacy of filming this project - the opening scene is shot on the street he grew up on in the Bronx - has erased a step of remove.
“When I was a kid, I had a guy who championed me and got me through in a school and gave me a good education,” he said, adding it was not the grammar school depicted in the film. “He was a predator; he just didn’t prey on me.”
A few years ago he received a letter from the man.
“He was dying and invited me to come to see him, and I didn’t go,” Mr. Shanley said.
Because?
“Because I had found out for certain that he had preyed on children since that time,” he said, recalling his conversation with a classmate at a 30th reunion. “I could still value what he did for me, but I could not honor him. It was one of those things where I never regretted, but it was bittersweet.”
The man, like the priests in the film, was a remarkable figure in the young Mr. Shanley’s life. As played by Mr. Hoffman, Father Flynn is the coolest guy in the room, a reminder to people of a certain age and culture - that includes many of us - that priests, especially post-Vatican II, represented a certain kind of radical intellectual freedom. And the nuns, imprisoned by ridiculous bonnets and habits that the Sisters of Mercy wore at the time, lagged behind as congregations and their priests rushed headlong into the future.
“I am interested in hierarchies,” Mr. Shanley said. “I think they reveal societies. I’m interested in the military; I’m interested in the church. They hold up a mirror, and I’m interested very much in where authority comes from, which is always a central element of hierarchy.”
He surmounted all manner of hierarchy by writing “Moonstruck,” a romantic comedy that made more than $80 million at the domestic box office more than two decades ago, proving once again that Cher could act and that Mr. Shanley could connect with audiences. He first stepped into the film director’s chair for “Joe Versus the Volcano,” about a hypochondriac who makes a deal to throw himself into a live volcano. But that film blew up into a financial and artistic disaster and pushed him back to the theater, for which he has written two dozen plays, including the Off Broadway hits “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Italian American Reconciliation” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.”
Some drama has dribbled off the stage and into his life - he’s been twice divorced - but for the time being he is content with the company of his two adopted sons, Nick and Frank, both 16. And make no mistake, he is clearly pleased that some of his recent gambles - not the least of which was deciding to take on the film version of “Doubt” after an 18-year hiatus as a film director - seem to have worked out.
“I wanted new,” he said. The stage director, Doug Hughes, “did an amazing job on the play, but I didn’t want to halfway sort of do it, like taking his great work and putting my name on it. I did not want to be the purveyor of someone else’s fish.”
With Mr. Shanley’s ready assent Ms. Streep in particular remakes what had been an indelible role on Broadway in the hands of Cherry Jones. Near the end of the film the character’s conviction gives way to something more human, more familiar and, in context, more disturbing.
“I liked Meryl,” Mr. Shanley said. “She’s tremendously intelligent, and we rehearsed for three weeks, and she made some new choices in rehearsal. She did the big one where he asked her if she ever committed a mortal sin, and she suddenly is stricken and basically confessed. And I said: ‘That works. I never thought of that.’ ”
Ms. Streep was thrilled that the movie contained the kind of collaboration that is oft-discussed and rarely executed.
“Everything that ever happened to John is very available to him in a way that I find remarkable,” Ms. Streep said. “He clearly remembers what happened to him in first grade. Still, even though he knew all of this, lived some of it, he has a generous artistic sensibility where there wasn’t just one way to do it.”
Celia Costas, the executive producer of the film, added: “John is so confident, it is entrenched in his molecular structure, and knows this material so well that I was surprised by how indulgent he was of other people’s input. We would campaign on various matters, and sometimes he would listen very carefully and agree, and other times he would listen just as carefully and not agree with any of it.”
“Shooting this film in New York at a time when movies go to the state or country that will give you the best toaster to work there was not very popular with the studio,” she said. “But John knew that this movie had to be shot in his old neighborhood, that there was no other way it would work.”
All directors are part of the marketing apparatus for serious film, especially at this time of year when the possibility of an Academy Award is floating around. Although Mr. Shanley would clearly rather do the work than talk about it, he sees value in the exercise.
“I’d like to attack the notion that movies are about certainty, about affirming a political profile and validating what people already believe,” he said. “So much of the work being done now is about that. The fact that they are sending me around and having me share those opinions with a lot of people, well, I probably should just go ahead and embrace it rather than fight it.”
'Doubt' and Doubts of a Workingman
By DAVID CARR
WHEN John Patrick Shanley steps into a Midtown Manhattan hangout known for its theater clientele, few would guess how much he belonged.
There is little about his sure gait, workingman hands or no-nonsense affect that flicks at the artist within, let alone a playwright, often the more delicately wrought of the species. Only the eyes, weakened by glaucoma but working, suggest anything other than a tough guy from the Bronx. And in that gaze he is constantly calibrating everything around him, seeing a great deal and concluding not much.
“It’s an important part of my personality that I continually adjudicate, but I never reach a verdict,” he explains.
If Mr. Shanley, 58, more resembles a craftsman - the wizened, handsome contractor - it only makes sense. He builds stuff, including “Doubt,” a cultural artifact so sturdy that it not only became a Broadway achiever, winning a Tony for best play, but a film staring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman that is among the mentioned in this year’s Oscar race. By the way, he already has one of those for writing the 1987 film “Moonstruck.” He’s been building and telling stories for a while.
A former marine and the son of an Irish immigrant father from County Westmeath, he has a lot of other prosaic credits in his résumé, including working as a locksmith, a bartender and an elevator operator. He is, in conversation and approach, very much a product of the kind of hard-knocks Roman Catholic primary school that frames the moral dilemma of “Doubt.”
Mr. Shanley has little time for the niceties of the press ritual and simply orders a drink and waits for the interview to begin. He is not unresponsive or unhelpful to the needs at hand, but having just watched his play “Romantic Poetry” get mauled by critics, he knows the backside of the hand that would anoint his movie. He does not write things to be the toast of the town - he once described praise as a kind of heroin - he writes them because that is what he does.
“I’ve lived through all sorts of versions of it, where they love what you did and then when they cross the street when they see you coming,” he said, sipping a Campari. “The part when they cross the street is when you begin to understand Shakespeare. They hated this show that I did three weeks ago, so I don’t have to think back a long time. These things hurt me, they upset me, but they don’t stop me from what I’m doing.”
He relates this with a kind of practical evenness that few artists can muster when they talk about criticism. He worries the work, less how it lands.
“I was very frightened to do ‘Doubt’ as a film,” he said. “It’s a very serious story, and these people do nothing but talk. There’s only four people in the play, and how am I going to do this in a truly cinematic fashion?”
Like the play, the film “Doubt” (which Miramax opens on Friday) is a moral gunfight set in the Bronx in 1964 between Father Brendan Flynn, a charismatic priest with a common touch, and Sister Aloysius Beauvier, a principal with an uncommon certainty about the failings of the people around her. Sister Aloysius (played by Ms. Streep), finds herself compelled to challenge Father Flynn (Mr. Hoffman) after a young nun played by Amy Adams comes to suspect that the priest’s interest in Donald, the school’s first black pupil, is not altogether wholesome. Unlike in the play, the children are very much present and prevent the script’s lacerating verbal firefights from lapsing into abstraction. The fact that a boy’s future is at stake is rendered in a delicate minuet of class and race during a stroll by Ms. Streep and Viola Davis, as Donald’s mother.
To further open up what is a close-quarters debate in the play, Mr. Shanley renders his old neighborhood in detail, replete with the tableau of people going to church and sitting attentively as the words of Father Flynn land around them. And those words - the so-called pillow sermon from the play - are annotated with visual imagery.
Scott Rudin, who produced the film, said he had little hesitation in signing Mr. Shanley as the director to turn the play he wrote into a film, saying, “I know him very well, and I felt the material was personal to him in a way that it wouldn’t be to anyone else.”
“I think that John is a first-class writer no matter what the form, who knows how to build a dramatic machine that is deeply satisfying to the audience,” Mr. Rudin said. “There is nothing postmodern about this movie. It is very pleasurably irony free and completely engages the big issues it is describing.”
One thing that did not change from stage to screen is that the audience still lands on the sidewalk afterward with a head full of questions and no certitude from the writer-director. At a party after a recent screening, a group of journalists and industry types who were well versed in the play veered into animated discussion about culpability, certainty and, yes, doubt. “Doubt” perseveres in part because at a time when the argument frequently goes to the loudest, the dilemma at the core of the film remains unresolved.
“You can’t know exactly what’s going on in your neighbor’s house or in his head or his heart,” Mr. Shanley said. “You can make suppositions, you can make assumptions, but you always have to factor in that you can’t know.”
For years Mr. Shanley has said the play was about the experience of someone he knew, but perhaps something about the intimacy of filming this project - the opening scene is shot on the street he grew up on in the Bronx - has erased a step of remove.
“When I was a kid, I had a guy who championed me and got me through in a school and gave me a good education,” he said, adding it was not the grammar school depicted in the film. “He was a predator; he just didn’t prey on me.”
A few years ago he received a letter from the man.
“He was dying and invited me to come to see him, and I didn’t go,” Mr. Shanley said.
Because?
“Because I had found out for certain that he had preyed on children since that time,” he said, recalling his conversation with a classmate at a 30th reunion. “I could still value what he did for me, but I could not honor him. It was one of those things where I never regretted, but it was bittersweet.”
The man, like the priests in the film, was a remarkable figure in the young Mr. Shanley’s life. As played by Mr. Hoffman, Father Flynn is the coolest guy in the room, a reminder to people of a certain age and culture - that includes many of us - that priests, especially post-Vatican II, represented a certain kind of radical intellectual freedom. And the nuns, imprisoned by ridiculous bonnets and habits that the Sisters of Mercy wore at the time, lagged behind as congregations and their priests rushed headlong into the future.
“I am interested in hierarchies,” Mr. Shanley said. “I think they reveal societies. I’m interested in the military; I’m interested in the church. They hold up a mirror, and I’m interested very much in where authority comes from, which is always a central element of hierarchy.”
He surmounted all manner of hierarchy by writing “Moonstruck,” a romantic comedy that made more than $80 million at the domestic box office more than two decades ago, proving once again that Cher could act and that Mr. Shanley could connect with audiences. He first stepped into the film director’s chair for “Joe Versus the Volcano,” about a hypochondriac who makes a deal to throw himself into a live volcano. But that film blew up into a financial and artistic disaster and pushed him back to the theater, for which he has written two dozen plays, including the Off Broadway hits “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Italian American Reconciliation” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.”
Some drama has dribbled off the stage and into his life - he’s been twice divorced - but for the time being he is content with the company of his two adopted sons, Nick and Frank, both 16. And make no mistake, he is clearly pleased that some of his recent gambles - not the least of which was deciding to take on the film version of “Doubt” after an 18-year hiatus as a film director - seem to have worked out.
“I wanted new,” he said. The stage director, Doug Hughes, “did an amazing job on the play, but I didn’t want to halfway sort of do it, like taking his great work and putting my name on it. I did not want to be the purveyor of someone else’s fish.”
With Mr. Shanley’s ready assent Ms. Streep in particular remakes what had been an indelible role on Broadway in the hands of Cherry Jones. Near the end of the film the character’s conviction gives way to something more human, more familiar and, in context, more disturbing.
“I liked Meryl,” Mr. Shanley said. “She’s tremendously intelligent, and we rehearsed for three weeks, and she made some new choices in rehearsal. She did the big one where he asked her if she ever committed a mortal sin, and she suddenly is stricken and basically confessed. And I said: ‘That works. I never thought of that.’ ”
Ms. Streep was thrilled that the movie contained the kind of collaboration that is oft-discussed and rarely executed.
“Everything that ever happened to John is very available to him in a way that I find remarkable,” Ms. Streep said. “He clearly remembers what happened to him in first grade. Still, even though he knew all of this, lived some of it, he has a generous artistic sensibility where there wasn’t just one way to do it.”
Celia Costas, the executive producer of the film, added: “John is so confident, it is entrenched in his molecular structure, and knows this material so well that I was surprised by how indulgent he was of other people’s input. We would campaign on various matters, and sometimes he would listen very carefully and agree, and other times he would listen just as carefully and not agree with any of it.”
“Shooting this film in New York at a time when movies go to the state or country that will give you the best toaster to work there was not very popular with the studio,” she said. “But John knew that this movie had to be shot in his old neighborhood, that there was no other way it would work.”
All directors are part of the marketing apparatus for serious film, especially at this time of year when the possibility of an Academy Award is floating around. Although Mr. Shanley would clearly rather do the work than talk about it, he sees value in the exercise.
“I’d like to attack the notion that movies are about certainty, about affirming a political profile and validating what people already believe,” he said. “So much of the work being done now is about that. The fact that they are sending me around and having me share those opinions with a lot of people, well, I probably should just go ahead and embrace it rather than fight it.”