No. Just No.

A few days ago, when I resolved to quit teasing people and go ahead and write something about or related to Steve McQueen in 2009, this isn’t what I had in mind. Today, IGN reports, via Variety, that a Steve McQueen biopic is in the works, based on an adaptation of Marshall Terrill’s biography Steve McQueen: Portrait Of An American Rebel. The film will be produced by Paramount (probably). It will be directed by Who Knows? And it will star someone way the fuck out of his league.

If it isn’t apparent, I’m bitter about this news. I’m so upset, I don’t know whether to barf or cry. Depending on who gets cast to play the King of Cool, I might try both simultaneously. Because, let’s be honest: McQueen wasn’t the most gifted actor, but there’s been no one quite like him before or since. There isn’t a mustache you can put on to look like him. There isn’t an accent you can use to sound like him. There aren’t any tics or gestures you can use to imitate him. So, to be Steve McQueen, you’ve got to be blond, blue-eyed and 100-percent fucking cool. In fact, come to think of it, blond and blue-eyed are optional.

Good luck, Hollywood. Good luck finding that guy. I know who you’re going to ask to play the part. Daniel Craig. Because if you watch Craig’s fast driving in the past few Bourne, I mean, Bond movies, and if you squint a bit, and if you imagine Craig in a turtleneck, well, you’ve got Frank Bullitt, and thus you’ve got an approximation of McQueen. But can’t we just remake Bullitt? Please? I’m begging you here. Hey, you remade The Thomas Crown Affair. I didn’t complain. Heck, make another Cincinnati Kid. Poker is huge these days. Again, I’m begging you! And you’ll make lots of money. And you don’t have to give me credit for the idea. Instead, just keep your hands off The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven and the great and magnificent Steve McQueen.

Oh, Hollywood. Cold, cruel Hollywood. In the coming months, I’ll have to endure the headlines about how Craig has passed on the project because he’s too busy filming Bond. And now Mark Wahlberg is on tap. Or Keifer Sutherland. Or maybe Vince Vaughn – let’s make it a comedy. This whole thing is a joke.

Yeah, I want to see McQueen on the big screen. At the revival house. Period.

A Winning Loss: Letters From Iwo Jima

[In light of the still-unfolding discussion of Gran Torino, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

With his companion pictures about the Battle of Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood has earned yet another bullet in the book of cinema history. What he hasn’t done is make a pair of great films. Flags Of Our Fathers, released earlier this year, is an erratic, sentimental mess. Letters From Iwo Jima, filmed successively and released just before the end of 2006, is considerably better but also unfortunately flawed. And yet if suffering through the first film is the price of getting to the second, it’s worth it. Because though Letters is far from perfect, its mere existence is a triumph.

Telling the story of Iwo Jima through the eyes of Japanese soldiers, Letters is a notably atypical war movie in at least three respects: it follows battle through the eyes of the (1) invaded and (2) eventually defeated, with (3) America standing in as the enemy. Thus the picture is an intriguing blend of The Alamo and (parts of) Tora! Tora! Tora! But in a picture sure to be hyper-analyzed in this country for any hint of anti-patriotism, the universal ugliness of warfare remains forever in the crosshairs.

All war film projects needn’t be as balanced as Eastwood’s Iwo Jima duo, but they should at least be this conscientious. The sad truth though is that without Flags there probably wouldn’t have been a Letters – not from an American studio at least. But while the making of a (literally) flag-waving American chapter is frustrating and offensive as a prerequisite for a Japanese edition, Eastwood’s separate-but-equal treatment is a wise way to go. By giving each side of the conflict its own unique film, Eastwood ensures that we don’t let the end sum of the battle (American victory in the face of more than 18,000 Japanese casualties) obscure our selection of heroes.

Earning top-billing in the film is Ken Watanabe (familiar to you from The Last Samurai) as General Kuribayashi, whose ingenious defense tactics allowed an out-manned and out-gunned Japanese force to turn what was expected to be a five-day American sweep into a 40-day epic. Watanabe fits the part well, his broad shoulders and tall frame exuding confidence while his soothing voice and winning smile express compassion. Kuribayashi, who toured America before the war, is a fascinating figure, whose actual letters home help to shape his character here. Alas, his genius, along with the resolve of his soldiers, is never properly portrayed.

The irony is that Eastwood undercuts the spirit of those he is trying to exalt by refusing to spend more time on the Xs and Os of battle. Though Eastwood does well in the set-up – showing Kuribayashi surveying the island to predict the Americans’ angle of attack, ordering the construction of crossfire zones and establishing an 11-mile tunnel structure connecting the Japanese gun ports – once the Americans hit the beach, time and place get lost. Over the last hour of this 140-minute picture we get a tedious parade of Japanese soldiers lurking through tunnels, falling back to who knows where, committing suicide when death seems immanent and arguing over whether retreat or suicide is the proper course of action. Meanwhile, Kuribayashi paces in his bunker and wonders why his messengers disappear.

The Japanese story of Iwo Jima is one of grit and sacrifice in the face of impossible odds. Most of the 22,000 soldiers suspected that they wouldn’t return from the tiny volcanic island. They battled dysentery, lived in reinforced caves that withstood the American aerial bombardment and generally waited to die. Their only mission was to kill at least 10 American soldiers each before they themselves fell. But unlike Americans at the Alamo there wasn’t a San Jacinto to avenge such suffering. All Iwo Jima did was help convince the U.S. military that the Japanese would fight to the very end, and that big bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be an easier means of victory.

It’s a pity then, given all that Japan’s troops endured, that the full of extent of the soldiers’ resilience gets lost in the timeless darkness of the caves. Eastwood’s film might feel like it takes 40 days unfold, but since we’re never given a feel for the geography of Iwo Jima, it’s nearly impossible to follow the battle. One moment the Americans arrive, the next they take Mount Suribachi and the next the battle is over. Just like that. Or so it feels. Equally frustrating, the action seems to peak-and-valley according to the dramatic needs of the screenplay (written by Iris Yamashita with collaboration from Paul Haggis). In one sequence, Americans take out a gun at one of the tunnel mouths, and yet the Japanese have time to dramatically (and brutally) sacrifice themselves with grenades before the enemy shows any sign of penetrating the breach.

Partly responsible for such missteps are Eastwood’s best intentions to keep this a solely Japanese story. Letters borrows some footage from Flags – mostly in the initial beach raid – but the films overlap only in time, location and visual theme. Once again, as in Flags, Eastwood has chosen to tint his film with a greenish monochrome haze – all the rage since Saving Private Ryan – even though it has the unfortunate effect of flattening the landscapes while making saturated fire-red explosions pop off the screen like Pleasantville anomalies. By the end of the movie I was dying to get outdoors to ensure that the sky was still blue.

But if Eastwood has a fault as a filmmaker, beyond his penchant for sentimentality, fussiness isn’t it. It’s being too casual. Though Letters has the possible excuse of being rushed through editing (it was initially slated for a February 2007 release), the movie is overlong and under-polished. Transitions are rough, close-ups are the rule even when inappropriate and flashbacks are halting and unnecessary. Somewhere in the midst of this shadowy maze there’s a touching story about a baker who never wanted to become a soldier (a powerful Kazunar Ninomiya) and a riveting though underdeveloped subplot about a former military policeman whose death on Iwo Jima punctuates a cruel fall from grace (Ryo Kase). But you’ll need a headlamp to keep track of them. Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film has arresting sparks, but it never quite finds the light of greatness.

A Losing Win: Flags Of Our Fathers

[In light of the still-unfolding discussion of Gran Torino, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

History is written by the victors, they say, but that isn’t keeping Clint Eastwood from directing two movies about the Battle of Iwo Jima. Flags Of Our Fathers, based on a book by James Bradley, recounts the battle best known for a misleadingly triumphant flag-raising from the American perspective. Letters From Iwo Jima, due in theaters in February 2007, will adopt the viewpoint of the Japanese. The exercise itself, making two films from opposing angles, hints at Eastwood’s message that heroism is subjective. But in case we might miss it, the painfully redundant Flags pounds the point home with a sledgehammer.

Working off one of the year’s most atrocious screenplays, a muddled and mindless mess by Oscar-winning scribe Paul Haggis, Flags follows three characters: Ryan Phillippe’s “Doc” Bradley, Jesse Bradford’s Rene Gagnon and Adam Beach’s Drunken Injun. Actually, the man Beach portrays is Ira Hayes, a Native American soldier who never got comfortable with the American Hero label thrust upon him after his return to the States. But in the entire film I counted only two scenes featuring Beach in which Hayes isn’t drinking, drunk or having his American Indian heritage referenced, usually with some sort of colorful slur. So I’m just going to call things as they are.

Of course, one could fairly argue that Haggis has the same aim, and that his multiple “chief” and “red” references are an effort to keep it real. Flags takes place in the less-enlightened mid-1940s, after all, with Brown v Board of Education a decade away. Still, it’s one thing to illustrate how someone like Hayes was marginalized by his minority status, and it’s something else entirely to actually reduce a man to that marginalized identity in the process. And that’s what happens here, over and over again. The film’s obsession with Hayes’ heritage is so unrelenting that as the movie rolled past the two-hour mark I felt certain we’d get a shot of Hayes selling fireworks or opening a casino. But those scenes must have been left on the cutting room floor.

Thank goodness something was. With a running time of 132 minutes, Flags takes forever to get almost nowhere. Haggis’ screenplay jumps back and forth from the events of Iwo Jima to its immediate aftermath and to the present day, as Doc’s son interviews veterans to get their memories of battle. In the meantime the screenplay also swaps points of view. And yet instead of detail and depth, all this method provides is more and more of the same. By the halfway point, we’ve been everywhere Flags is going to take us. And in most cases we’ve been there twice.

In fairness, some of Flags’ leftover flavor stems from its unfortunate position in the cinematic assembly line. Just like John Ford’s The Searchers made it impossible for a director to ever again frame someone in a doorway without seeming derivative, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan ruined the World War II-era beach-storming. While in SPR it was the coast of Normandy, and here it’s Iwo Jima, with Mount Suribachi looming in the background, the sequences feel so familiar that you could mix shots from the two films without detecting a difference.

That’s a compliment in some respects, but Eastwood could have done us all a favor by not shooting in the unsaturated greens and grays that are starting to feel like standard issue – the WWII Collection by Dutch Boy. In black and white, Flags might have possessed a whiff of novelty – and it’s surprising that Eastwood didn’t leap at the chance to go colorless, because his favored scene composition is to have his actors huddled in the one available corner of light in otherwise shadow-filled rooms.

Flags doesn’t bend to every war movie cliché – for example, I don’t think there’s a single case of a soldier being catapulted into the air by an explosion – but too much feels too familiar. And too something else as well: small. In depicting portions of a 40-day engagement that claimed nearly 26,000 lives on an island about a third the size of Manhattan, Eastwood’s Iwo Jima often comes off like a mild skirmish fought out between 50 per side.

There’s something kind of fitting about that, however, because Flags is all about the deceptiveness of historical snapshots, or in this case one historic snapshot. If the most iconic image of American warfare isn’t George Washington crossing the Delaware, memorialized with great inaccuracy by painter Emanuel Leutze, then it’s got to be Joe Rosenthal’s equally deceptive photograph of six troops struggling to raise the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi. The flag in the photo was actually the second to be raised that day, on what was just the fifth day of fighting, with conquest far from assured. Nevertheless, the image instantly became a symbol of victory at a time when the nation desperately needed good news and, not coincidentally, the military desperately needed cash.

Feeding on the public’s love of the photo, the U.S. government asked the surviving participants of the flag-raising (three of the men died soon after) to return to the States to have their heroism celebrated in an effort to sell war bonds. Flags suggests that Gagnon enjoyed the spotlight, that Hayes was repulsed by it and that Doc Bradley had almost no emotion whatsoever (Phillippe’s performance is as pasty and lifeless as wallpaper). But here’s what’s strange: By foisting villainy on the government for its exploitation, Flags doesn’t demystify the contributions of the Greatest Generation, it sweetens the romance.

These days, in the aftermath of both the “Mission Accomplished” photo-op and the Abu Ghraib snapshots, two memorable but contradictory visual messages about the so-called War on Terror, one wonders how we might remember WWII today if our soldiers had hit the beaches with digital cameras in their pockets. A character in Flags says that one photo can win or lose a war. And that’s probably true. But one photo cannot capture a war, and maybe not even a battle. In Flags, Eastwood has a number of opportunities to define the heroes of Iwo Jima, but his characters leave the film as faceless and obscure as they are in Rosenthal’s photo. Letters will give Eastwood a second chance. And he needs it.

[Tomorrow: Letters From Iwo Jima]

Utterly Offensive: Gran Torino

Gook. Zipperhead. Dragon lady. These are among the many – and I mean many – slurs that pop up in Gran Torino with the frequency that Asians eat dogs (another Gran Torino slur). They are delivered almost exclusively by Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski, who is one of the last Caucasians still living in a modest Michigan neighborhood that, as Walt might say it, has become overrun by the Hmong. A war veteran with a silver star locked away in his basement, Walt is a proud American with a not so proud past. He’s haunted by his memories of fighting in Korea, and in the faces of his neighbors he sees the dead Korean soldiers that he and his compatriots “stacked like sandbags.” Safe to say, Walt hates his neighbors for not being white. Then again, with his wife now dead, Walt hates just about everyone, including his kids and grandkids.

As Gran Torino begins, Walt is prepared to live out his final years in his perfectly tidy house, behind his perfectly swept front porch and his perfectly manicured lawn, with nothing but his hatred of others and his adeptness with racial slurs to entertain him. Over the course of the film, through an accidental bond with the Hmong kids next door, Walt’s xenophobia will subside, but his penchant for slurs will not. And so when I tell you that Gran Torino is one of the most offensive films this year, I’m of course referring to the saltiness of its dialogue. But only in part. Because as odious and indefensible as Walt’s vernacular is on its own, the most repulsive thing about Gran Torino is its structure, which is thin, repetitive, amateurish and, oh yeah, entirely hypocritical.

Let’s start with the last part first. Gran Torino, based on a screenplay by Nick Schenk, would have you believe that it preaches against racism and treats its minority subjects honorably, but that’s only half right. Yes, through Walt, xenophobia is portrayed as a dead-end existence. Yes, Walt learns, after spending about 30 minutes at his neighbors’ home, that “I have more in common with these gooks than with my own family.” But in the meantime Gran Torino teaches us some other things. It teaches us that slurs are okay, even if you mean them, so long as you’re charming. It teaches us that the Hmong might be good people, but that if they want to get anything done (fix appliances, clean up a yard, end a gang war) they need whitey to help. And it teaches us that Clint Eastwood can get away with bloody well anything.

The honorability of Eastwood the man is hard at work in Gran Torino. We want to like Walt because it’s impossible to dislike Clint. And so when Walt goes into one of his slur-filled rants, which is pretty much the entire film, it’s frighteningly tempting to give him a pass. Because the truth is that before we see Walt, we see Clint – the gentle sparkle in his eyes shining through that trademark squint. We know that Eastwood – whose Letters From Iwo Jima is one of the most respectful depictions of Asians, or of any wartime enemy, to ever come out of Hollywood – isn’t racist, and that takes some of the bite out of Walt’s bark. So does the fact that Walt’s bark is almost never the same. “Gook” and “zipperhead” are favorite terms, but Walt uses at least two dozen slurs in all. At one point, he pops off about five different Asian slurs in 10 seconds. After a while, it starts to feel as if Walt isn’t hateful so much as clever.

Or maybe he’s just colorful. Perhaps Walt uses “gook” the way a Martin Scorsese character would use the word “fuck.” Because “this is the way guys talk.” That’s what Walt says. And to make sure we don’t think Walt is one sick anti-Asian bigot, Gran Torino gives him a few scenes at the barbershop where the “Polack” Walt trades white-guy jabs with his son of a bitch “Wop” barber, played by John Carroll Lynch. The free-flowing exchange of racial epithets creates such a festival of good cheer that eventually Walt brings the impressionable Thao (Bee Vang) along for an education. Because Walt isn’t racist, understand. He’s just old-school. That’s why it’s a shame that Walt is a widower, because otherwise Thao’s next lesson could have been in wife-beating – that’s what guys do, right? Please. The real joke here is any suggestion whatsoever that Walt’s behavior is acceptable because his Hmong neighbors don’t take him seriously, or because he and his barber engage in name-calling as sport.

If this reading of Gran Torino seems too uptight for you, do me a favor: Imagine the same movie, except replace the Hmong neighbors with African-Americans. Now, instead of Walt chuckling while telling his Asian neighbors not to eat his dog, imagine him telling his black neighbors to take a break from eating fried chicken to bojangle for him. Or maybe Walt could refer to them as slave-ship cargo. Or maybe he could just call them “niggers” over and over. Would that be charming? How about this: Instead of being of Polish descent, let’s make Walt a German. His neighbors don’t have to be people of color, they can be Jews. And now Walt can grin while inviting his neighbors over to his place to take a shower. Are you laughing yet? I’m not.

See, the fact that there’s no long ugly history of unrest between whites and Hmong in this country doesn’t make Walt’s behavior good comedy. It makes it good comedy for now – until someone learns from it, emulates it and eventually creates the uncomfortable context that should already be obvious. Gran Torino doesn’t mean to be offensive, nor do the people who laugh at it. When I saw the movie in downtown Washington, DC, in a theater with a racially diverse audience, many howled at the film. But none of them, far as I could tell, was Hmong. It’s always easier to laugh when someone else takes the brunt. And the truth is that with a different cast of racial minorities, or with a different star at its center, Gran Torino would likely inspire picket lines.

But moral and sociological issues aside, Gran Torino is still a film to protest. Because movie fans should be appalled at dialogue that’s more on-the-nose than anything M Night Shyamalan or Paul Haggis has written. We should be annoyed that Sue (Ahney Her) is forced to explain her Hmong culture like she’s reading from Wikipedia. We should be outraged with the way the racially-charged climate of the neighborhood looks as if it was modeled off an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. We should be upset that an experienced filmmaker like Eastwood couldn’t give better direction to Vang, who spends the whole film slump-shouldered, working so hard to be pathetic. We should be disappointed with the triteness of it all, with the way so many scenes feel like a 1980s “Just Say No” commercial. And then we should be honest enough to admit that if this movie were directed by and starring Mel Gibson, it would play a whole lot differently.

Nine Resolutions for Oh-Nine

As tagged by Fox of Tractor Facts, continuing the meme created at DVD Panache, here are nine movie-related resolutions for 2009:

(In no specific order.)

1. Quit teasing people and write at least one post about or related to Steve McQueen, for crying out loud.

2. Be more dedicated about watching items in my Netflix queue. (Finally seeing Raising Arizona in 2008 was fine and good, but I’m not sure it was worth the $30 or so that I paid to have that little red envelope sit untouched for months.)

3. Be more dedicated about watching DVDs from my own collection, which would happen more often if I could learn to stop worrying and not be so anal about needing to watch movies uninterrupted from start to finish. (Like most people, there are dozens of movies that I’ve seen dozens of times that I let play in the background as I’m doing things around the apartment. But if I purchase a movie after seeing it only once in the theater, I have a nasty habit of wanting that precious second-ever viewing to be entirely disruption-free. Which would explain, for example, why I still haven’t watched There Will Be Blood, despite excitedly buying the DVD within a week of its release.)

4. Find another movie poster that through a combination of its graphic artistry and subject matter is worthy of being professionally matted and framed for display alongside my current collection, which includes The Thin Red Line, The New World, Bullitt, The Great Escape, Amelie … Wait a minute. Maybe my resolution should be to find more wall space.

5. At least investigate the technology purchases that would be required in order for me to be able to create some video-based analyses and celebrations here at The Cooler from time to time. I’ve been writing about movies for more than a decade now. I need to write. Always will. But I’m interested in exploring new forms of criticism, too.

6. Let this be the year that I come to the terms with the fact that this actor ...

and this actor ...

are actually the same person.

7. Find one new-to-me engaging voice on film from around the blogosphere each month, and continue use the “Sharin’ the Love” feature to highlight interesting reads, so that there’s always something new to read at The Cooler (even when I don’t have a new post), and so that others can discover new, engaging voices, too. (On that note, I’d like to give a plug to FilmDr, who this week has provided some very entertaining dispatches from the frontlines of his two-week video production class for high schoolers. Check it out.)

8. Somehow come to terms with the fact that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do as much reading (not skimming, reading) and commenting at other blogs as I’d like. Alas, I’m going to miss some great commentary. I need to be OK with that.

9. Seize the opportunity created by a thriving newspaper industry and a booming economy to quit my day job and begin a long, lucrative career writing about film. (OK, so it’s eight resolutions and one Dumbo-esque hallucination.)

Happy 2009, everybody! What are your movie-related resolutions?

Bigger Screen, Smaller Suspense: Frost/Nixon

Ron Howard’s best film, Apollo 13, is a reminder that suspense isn’t beholden to surprise. Prior to seeing the film upon its release in 1995, I was familiar enough with the real-life details of the titular 1970 Moon mission gone awry to know that the movie would end more or less happily, but I’ll be damned if that blunted the impact. And so it’s been ever since. No matter how many times I watch Apollo 13 – and it’s probably been a half-dozen by now – it never fails to hook me: the gut-wrenching radio silence that marks the spacecraft’s reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere seems to grow longer and more perilous upon each viewing. How exactly Howard achieves this magical effect, I’m still not quite sure, but I do know that the voodoo of Apollo 13 is sorely lacking in Howard’s latest picture, Frost/Nixon.

Whereas Apollo 13 transcends history, Frost/Nixon is undone by it. Written by Peter Morgan, based on his own stage play, Frost/Nixon requires its audience to be both educated and unaware. For the film to have its most profound impact, the audience must be fully familiar with the contempt many Americans held for Richard M Nixon by the end of his presidency, while remaining ignorant of the places David Frost took Nixon in their famous interview turned quasi-confessional of 1977. Without this balance, Frost/Nixon can entertain, certainly, but it would be difficult for it to enthrall. By moving from stage to screen, Frost/Nixon must play by different rules, the most significant of which is that its dramatization must be more compelling than the real-life footage. And in this respect, Howard’s film comes up just short.

The chief error of Frost/Nixon is that its principle drama hangs on the proceedings of the interviews themselves, which in this day and age are just a YouTube visit or a DVD rental away. Expectedly, the screenplay looks to broaden the story by giving us the behind-the-scenes tale of Frost’s Herculean efforts just to make the interviews happen. But the unfortunate side-effect is that Frost/Nixon is rendered a personal battle between interviewer and subject, thus undermining the notion that their battle royale was in fact something more: America vs. Nixon. This would all be fine and good if the movie cast Frost in the role of Rocky Balboa. But when Frost should be doing the interviewer’s equivalent of punching slabs of meat with the determination of the underdog, he’s instead seen gallivanting about with the overconfidence of Apollo Creed. The obviously manufactured device in which Frost rallies at the 11th hour to knuckle down and do his homework doesn’t provide the adrenaline rush that’s intended. Instead it inspires the question: What took him so long?

With Frost seemingly disinterested, the stakes of Howard’s drama are made small – unless, of course, you know your history and understand how enormous the stakes really were. Of course, if you know that, you most likely also know how the Frost-Nixon interview went down. There’s the rub. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their stage roles and bring vibrancy to their respective portrayals of the interviewer and the stonewaller, but the cinematic format is working against them. On stage, the audience feeds on the visceral sensation of being there, while also getting to self-edit the action by determining where to place one’s focus. (When the questions get tough, do you watch the prosecutor or the defendant?) But in film form, Frost/Nixon’s dramatizations of the interviews provide no change in the viewing experience from the readily available archival footage, making comparisons inevitable. Why study the sweaty face of Langella’s Nixon as he buckles under pressure when one could just as easily watch the real thing?

Though not as confined as Doubt, Frost/Nixon suffers similar problems in its liberation (or lack thereof) from the stage. The primary disappointment is that Howard finds no way to illustrate America’s discontentment with Nixon other than filtering it through the remarks of a single character, Sam Rockwell’s James Reston Jr, one of Frost’s researchers. Even worse, most of the anti-Nixon sentiment is delivered via lazy talking-head interviews – not with the real Reston, let’s be clear, but with Rockwell’s Reston. It’s a violation of the show-don’t-tell rule of screenwriting to the nth degree, and Howard’s adaptation is dominated by the device. Likewise, the only way Howard finds to portray the shifting position of advantage in the Frost-Nixon interview is to cut to melodramatic reaction shots from members of each man’s support team – groans when points are lost, nods of approval when points are won.

Howard is a better director than this, but he very rarely shows it here. His best decision is to shoot much of the non-interview footage at Nixon’s actual ocean-view estate in San Clemente, California. In numerous exterior shots, Nixon is the sole obstacle between the audience and the Pacific, illustrating just how far the president has gone from his preferred place on the East Coast, in the middle of it all, in the action. His shame-inspired exile took him literally to the end of the earth, where he gazes into the nothingness, wondering where everything went. These shots, more than any concoction of the screenplay, best demonstrate how Nixon arrived at his interview with Frost knowing that he’d have to overcome his pride and assume some sort of repentant position if he was ever to rejoin society.

Along those lines, Frost/Nixon paints a mostly sympathetic picture of Nixon while still confronting some of his less attractive qualities, including a fabricated drunk-dial of Frost’s hotel room. Morgan and Howard suggest that Nixon was ready to suffer a knockout blow from Frost, but that he wanted to go down to a heavyweight’s hook and perhaps antagonized his interviewer until the softball-tosser (more Larry King than Mike Wallace) rose to the occasion. It’s an interesting interpretation, but it takes a backseat to the excitement of the interviews themselves. Which makes it all the more curious that Howard fails to capitalize on the broadcast’s allure: According to Reston, Frost’s victory wasn’t obvious until he watched the footage on TV and realized that the close-up provided an even deeper confession than Nixon ever managed in words. How strange it is then that rather than reserving his close-ups for Nixon’s reaction shots, Howard frames the majority of his film so tightly that I often felt like I was sitting in the front row. Frost/Nixon may put us close to the entertainment, but we’re farther away from the historical drama.

Staged Drama: Doubt

The role of the cold, intimidating Sister Aloysius Beauvier, who if she worshipped fashion instead of God might have been the villain of The Devil Wears Prada, went to Meryl Streep. The role of the twinkly and naive Sister James, who is a mere pregnancy away from starring in Junebug, went to Amy Adams. For the role of the potentially pedophilic, or maybe just misunderstood, Father Flynn, a call went out to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won his Oscar playing the equally loved and loathed Truman Capote. And so when it came time to select a director for Doubt, the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize winning stage drama, the pragmatic producers picked none other than Shanley himself, presumably on the hunch that practice makes perfect.

The bad news is, it doesn't. Doubt might be one of the finest acted films of 2008, but it’s undone by a mediocre directorial effort that suggests Shanley doesn’t fully appreciate the differences between stage and screen. Here’s a case of a director knowing his material too well, and in all the wrong ways. On stage, the enigmatic tug-of-war between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn thrives on the shadowy distance between the actors and the audience. On screen, however, that sense of mystery is obliterated. Here, Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn are less ambiguous than they are contradictory: Their dialogue suggests one thing, their expressions suggest something else. The result isn’t doubt or even vagueness. Instead it’s the sense that this two-way interrogation is in fact nothing more than a game, an exercise among the captains of the debate team.

The crux of the problem is the camera that never lies. Oh, sure, it misleads. Films ranging from The Conversation to The Sixth Sense have cashed in on the deceptive nature of the straightforward image. But as an audience we are defaulted to assign meaning to everything that we see, and Doubt reveals too much too plainly. To look into Father Flynn’s eyes – something the stage doesn’t allow – is to have an opinion that renders his testimony moot. That makes Doubt, which in stage form was called Doubt, A Parable, a primer on the power of the close-up that aligns Shanley’s film more closely with Frost/Nixon than A Few Good Men, to name two other stage-to-screen adaptations. Just like Richard Nixon’s facial expressions provided the full confession he never quite articulated to interviewer David Frost, Father Flynn’s countenance reveals that there isn’t much mysterious about Doubt after all.

It’s not for lack of effort. Within this drawn-out affair, the framework of what I’m sure was a knockout play is evident. Early in the film, for example, Shanley toys with our preconceptions about sexually predatory priests, giving us a moment alone between Father Flynn and Donald (Joseph Foster) when the priest gives the altar boy a gift. Later, Shanley gives us a moment in the gym when Father Flynn gives basketball instructions to knobby-kneed boys in shorts who in his presence manage to seem half undressed. In those scenes, we rush to the same judgment of Sister Aloysius, because, like her, we’ve seen things. The cloud of the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals hovers ominously above the screen, and so we sit expectant of the moment when Father Flynn will touch one of the boys improperly. When such a moment never comes, we’re left with only our suspicions. And so later, when Sister Aloysius makes an extremely serious allegation based on equally flimsy evidence, Shanley’s drama makes us allies in her witch hunt, because her gut feeling is ours too.

In that moment, we’re hooked. But then things fall apart. Streep brings appropriate heft to her part – though if you want to see a chilling nun, check out Geraldine McEwan in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters – but Hoffman’s dance isn’t with Father Flynn’s accuser but with the doubt the film’s title demands. In his fiery confrontation with Sister Aloysius, Flynn acts neither like a criminal caught in the act nor like someone wrongfully accused. (Mild spoiler warning: There is perhaps a third option, that Flynn was guilty in the past but not in this case. Nonetheless …) The result is that Doubt’s big dramatic moments feel like just that: drama. When Streep rips the crucifix from around her neck, the gesture is as unnecessarily oversized as Shanley’s all-too-numerous (and gag-me silly) God-in-the-weather metaphors. And thus Doubt reduces itself to a stage play, stuck under glass, caught on film.

It’s as if Shanley, whose only other movie is Joe Versus The Volcano, couldn’t think beyond the walls of his de facto courtroom drama. The director’s attempts to make his film cinematic range from the lazy (tilting his camera to suggest moral tumult) to the curious (cutting away from Father Flynn’s parable on lies for an unnecessary feathers-to-the-wind reenactment). Viola Davis, as Donald’s mother, briefly liberates Doubt from its drab little cage in a walk-and-talk outside St. Nicholas school in which Sister Aloysius voices her suspicions about Father Flynn. But even that scene manages to make Doubt’s dramatic landscape diminish, as the unexpected response of Mrs. Miller presents the audience with a moral dilemma more challenging than the one surrounding Father Flynn. And thus the main event seems almost superfluous.

That doesn’t mean it’s a drag, necessarily. Movies like Doubt, with their multiple opportunities for highlight-reel grandstanding, are built for awards season, and it’s frequently enjoyable to watch Streep, Adams and Hoffman trade punches like heavyweights. (Streep, it won’t surprise you, has a thick accent to match the 1964 Bronx setting; of course, that raises the question of why no one else is so afflicted.) Still, it’s startling – and disappointing – to reach the end of the exercise and feel that Shanley has put numerous weighty issues on the table without forcing us to bite into any of them. This film’s form of doubt doesn’t gnaw at us, it removes us. And so no matter the intent, the lesson to be learned from Shanley’s adaptation isn’t one of ethics, religion or morality. It’s one of entertainment: When it comes to doubt, creating it and dramatizing it are two different things.