Nuns and Nazis

Confession Number Whatever: I think the hype surrounding Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet is a bit much. Sure, they're good actresses, but the be all and end all of film? No, I don't think so.

In other words, when I saw their latest prestige projects on the same day, I had to do a joint review.

The calendar has turned to December, which means Oscar talk and chatter about two of today’s most lauded actresses, Meryl Streep and Kate Winslet. The 14- and five-time Academy-Award nominees make their seemingly annual cases for the gold statue: Meryl and her latest accent as a nun in Doubt, Kate as a woman in emotional hiding (but certainly not physical) in The Reader. The films, literary adaptations both, present troubling scenarios and to their credit don’t always provide solutions. They’re also flawed productions, with less-than-perfect work from their leading ladies.

(Yes, Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood Foreign Press and Academy: Winslet’s role is a lead performance, not a supporting one. Let her compete against herself in Revolutionary Road and have voters decide where she’s better.)

With Streep and Doubt, the issue is overreaching and, subsequently, staginess. John Patrick Shanley brings his Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play to the screen, a gripping tale of possible pedophilia at a Bronx parish. It’s 1964, and the winds of change - oh, those winds - are rustling. Is the attention Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) shows the school’s first black student (Joseph Foster) compassionate [Donald has no friends but a keen interest in religion] or something more sinister [this is Flynn’s third parish in five years]? Did the young Sister James (Amy Adams, whose naivete borders on dense) misconstrue matters, or were her suspicions to Sister Aloysius (Streep) correct? “Doubt can be a bond as powerful and as sustaining as certainty” - but how certain are the thoughts motivating Sister Aloysius?

Shanley, who directs as well as writes, uses cinema’s more visual nature to play up Doubt’s metaphors. This becomes a liability. It’s not enough to hear Aloysius say, “It’s my job to outshine the fox in cleverness.” We have to see a cat going after a mouse and the leaves falling from the trees, and we have to hear the breezes over and over again, like a sound machine on the fritz. The text is strong enough on its own; Shanley should have trusted his words. He also doesn’t seem to realize actors don’t speak on film the way they do in a theater. The long-building confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn comes across more as a screaming fest, with Hoffman and especially Streep forgetting it’s about emotion, not projection.

Hoffman said in a Wall Street Journal interview that he had to decide about his character’s guilt or innocence before he began filming, although he hoped the audience couldn’t tell what his choice was. I certainly couldn’t; I changed my mind about Flynn’s motivations a half-dozen times. Excluding the Big Blowup, Hoffman acts with subtlety, unlike Ms. Meryl. She can’t help the existence of the pilgrim-like costume, but she also doesn’t help us see past it. The ruler, the broad inflection, the dour expression - it’s practically a parody of a nun. Viola Davis, in one 10-minute scene with Streep as Donald’s mother, modulates and conveys more feeling that her more-famous co-star.

As for Generation X’s kudos queen, Winslet strips down again, this time as a 30-something woman in 1958 having a fling with a boy she always calls “kid.” She discovers him sick in an alley, and she likes to be read to. The affair ends abruptly, and then it’s seven years later. The “kid,” Michael (David Kross), is 22, a law student and observing the trial of several female Nazi prison guards - one of whom happens to be Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), his summer lovin’.

At one point, The Reader might as well have been The Hours, Part 2: best-selling book (this one by Bernhard Schlink) adapted by David Hare for a film directed by Stephen Daldry starring Nicole Kidman. Substitute Winslet for Kidman, who dropped out due to pregnancy, but otherwise The Reader resembles of one of those cold, arty Kidman flicks such as Birth, Fur and, yes, The Hours. Even Winslet’s German-accented English sounds like Kidman’s speech. Winslet gets Hanna’s stern, disconnected nature right, yet when we’re supposed to connect to Hanna reading later, the actress appears to be smothered by her old-lady makeup.

Then again, the hardest part of The Reader is how distasteful so much of it is. The link between literature and lust could be luscious - if only the surrounding circumstances weren’t so lewd. Kross, the “kid” who plays Michael, displays maturity and none of the precocious fumbling seen in “I lost my virginity” stories. Still, he was 17 when filming began; Daldry had to shut down production until the actor was 18 to film the sex scenes. No matter how one looks at it, this is discomforting: If the gender roles were reversed, women’s groups would be protesting this a la Lolita. Where’s the outcry here? Furthermore, the music swells most romantically when Ralph Fiennes (the grown-up Michael) is reading novels into a tape recorder for a jailed, guilty Nazi prison guard. Hanna never expresses remorse for what she’s done - she even asks a judge whether she should have not taken a job at Siemens - yet we’re supposed to be captivated by the pull this love of a sort still has on Michael after all these years? I’d recommend a good therapist.