Streep Fetish

Doubt is a movie about Meryl Streep. It has all the things
you want it to have—a satisfying visual texture, a cold energy, a
prurient central mystery, I-fucking-hate-you dialogue, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and very few characters (i.e., lots of
Streep). She plays a nun, so most of her is wrapped in black, except
her eyes and nose and mouth and famous cheeks. In a review of the movie
in the New York Times the other day, Manohla Dargis wrote: “The
performance may make no sense in the context of the rest of the film,
but it is—forgive me, Father—gratifying nunsense.” It has
to be pointed out that (1) that sentence is embarrassing, and (2) in a
movie built purely on dialogue and facial expressions, it always makes sense to include Streep’s face. (Dargis’s argument is a critic’s
argument: “Ms. Streep appears to be in a Gothic horror thriller while
everyone else looks and sounds closer to life or at least dramatic
realism.” I’m not totally clear on what “dramatic realism” is, but I’ll
take “thriller” any day.) Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
this is a movie based on a play about people sitting indoors and
arguing; with such a limited visual scope, as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? proved, you need a barn
to burn, emotionally speaking. Who else can set a barn on fire with
their face?

Streep’s face makes an entrance early on. A kid in a pew during
Catholic services leans forward, exhausted, resting against the back of
the pew in front of him, when a strange black shape bows into the
frame, birdlike, and the top of the shape pivots to reveal that it’s a
head. It’s Streep’s head. “Straighten!” she says to the child, and the
kid bolts upright. In the lobby before the movie started, I overheard a
woman saying to her friend, “I love anything with Meryl
Streep—anything.” And once it started, it occurred to me
that that woman must be in proverbial heaven: John Patrick Shanley,
directing this adaptation of his own play, strips away almost
everything but her. Even Hoffman, who’s marvelous as always, comes off
as kind of minor, the object of Streep’s attention and an object for
her to act against. “You haven’t the slightest proof of anything!” he
says (the assist). “But I have my certainty!” she says (for the
win!).

Doubt is the best kind of challenging movie—where the
intellectual challenge facing the characters becomes an intellectual
challenge for you, the person watching it, and the difficulty, the
doubt, the taboo question, has enough batteries to long outlast the
movie, to bug you in the car on the way home and keep bugging you days
later. It’s not just that the priest (Hoffman) may or may not be guilty
of molesting a schoolboy (can you imagine such a thing?), or that the
moral standard-bearer (Streep) so set on destroying him has no proof of
anything; those elements of the conflict are established within 15
minutes and are easy to chew on. What’s challenging are the ensuing
complications, like when you find yourself sympathetic to a mother
uninterested in knowing the truth and fully willing to abide—on
loving, rational terms—the possibility of her son being molested.
What if the kid, who’s black, needs the prestige of this particular
Catholic school to do well in life? What if the kid is gay?

The final turn of the movie I won’t describe, so as not to spoil the
surprise, but it has solely to do with Streep’s character. Really, she
is the main attraction here, in makeup befitting a corpse. This movie
is Streep porn. It presents her as a thing worthy of a fetish. It’s an
hour and a half of her just doing things: digging some food out of her
teeth, looking intensely at a bunch of pages in the blurry foreground,
not getting the seat she wants in a room, sitting at the head of a
table while someone very slowly pours milk in everyone’s glasses,
responding to a request with a “yes” that is the opposite of a yes,
kicking a fallen branch out of a pathway, winding a bunch of twine
around her fingers, talking over a ringing telephone, standing in a
harshly blowing wind, screwing in an overhead light bulb with a long
stick, petting a cat. She does more than anyone while barely doing
anything.