Shanley writes people who talk better than their lives should allow, a priest, a nun, a family at dinner, and the lines hold up unaided. Behind the camera he does not trust what he has written, and a film about certainty ends up looking nervous.
Fi1m perspective
Father Flynn climbs into a wooden pulpit in Doubt (2008) and tells a story about gossip, a pillow and a knife. It is told so well that we wanted the man telling it to be innocent, and then caught ourselves and distrusted the wanting. That is John Patrick Shanley's trade in a single scene. He hands eloquence to people who would not ordinarily have it, a parish priest, a nun, a family round a table, and leaves us to decide whether the words are the truth or the performance.
He came up through off-Broadway plays in the late 1970s and arrived in cinema with two scripts in the same year, Five Corners and Moonstruck (both 1987). Then came Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), his first film as director, which was not well received and sent him back to the theatre for most of two decades. The play Doubt: A Parable (2005) brought him back to the screen; he adapted and directed it himself in 2008, and later did the same with Outside Mullingar (2014), which became Wild Mountain Thyme (2020). He has said of the first of those adaptations: "When plays are turned into films, people stop listening. This was the hardest script I ever wrote."
Moonstruck is still the best case for him. Shanley gives Cher's Loretta and her relatives the language people wish they could find when a row at home turns into an argument about their whole lives, and he gives the older generation, Olympia Dukakis's Rose and Vincent Gardenia's Cosmo, wants of their own rather than a job explaining the heroine. Norman Jewison lets the actors say it all with conviction and keeps enough everyday fuss around them that it never turns pompous. Nicolas Cage shouts his way through some of it. The lines survive him.
Doubt shows the problem. Shanley wrote lines that can hold a film up unaided, and Streep, Hoffman, Adams and Davis prove it, yet whenever certainty wobbles he tilts the camera, gets the wind up and blows a light bulb. It is a writer not trusting his own writing, and it makes a film about conviction look nervous. Most critics found Wild Mountain Thyme broader and more caricatured still, the Irish-American material he usually handles with care played for cartoon, and nothing we know of it suggests they were wrong.
Start with Moonstruck, go on to Doubt for the pulpit, and when the next Shanley film comes round, check who is directing it before you check who wrote it.
Biography
John Patrick Shanley is an American playwright, screenwriter and director. He was born in 1950 in The Bronx, New York, and studied at New York University.
Shanley wrote the screenplay for the film Moonstruck (1987), for which he received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His play Doubt: A Parable (2005) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play; he later wrote and directed the 2008 film adaptation. Other screen credits include Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), which he also directed, Alive (1993), Congo (1995) and Wild Mountain Thyme (2020).
