Powerful hints to leave you in a state of moral confusion

Doubt takes us into the narrow but intense world of a Catholic high school in the Bronx in 1964, where a steely nun, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the mother superior, gets information from a young innocent nun, a history teacher in the school, Sister James (Amy Adams), and decides that Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has an "improper relation" with a boy. She moves to force Father Flynn to leave.

The film was directed from his own screenplay by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the original play produced on Broadway in 2004 and later in London. Shanley’s action is cunningly constructed so as to be coy, yet nonetheless riveting. The events are crucial--and yet they are perhaps, ultimately, not. The issues are bold--yet they are unclear. There is a Jesuitical ingenuity about the arguments and the implications of the plot. They seem spun out of thin air, and you may feel left empty-handed. Nonetheless, amazingly, they also leave you shattered. The main issue indeed is doubt--and suspicion--and how, in the narrow and parochial world of a Catholic school in 1964, people can be manipulated, their lives perhaps destroyed--altered forever anyway—due to pressures and insinuations, with barely a shred of solid evidence to go on.

Doubt is a bond uniting people as strong as certainty: Father Flynn says this in a sermon he delivers at the outset. The issues are clear though the facts are not. And there are complications. Sister Aloysius adopts a pose of certainty, but in the last scene she sobs and declares she has terrible doubts.

The boy, Donald Muller (Joseph Foster), looked troubled after being called down from Sister James's history class to see Father Flynn, and Sister James smelled alcohol on his breath. This is all Sister Aloysius has to go on. The fact is, Aloysius doesn't like Father Flynn, with his taste for pop music and ballpoint pens and his friendly manner with the boys. These things don't tell us if he's guilty or not. But to Sister they're trappings of the Devil.

Donald Muller complicates matters in two ways. He is the first Negro boy to attend the high school. When Mrs. Muller (Viola Davis, in a powerful performance) comes to talk to Sister Aloysius, she reveals that her son is "that way." She is glad Father Flynn is taking an interest in the boy, because he was ostracized by his classmates at public school for his inclinations, and his father hates him. He needs an adult to support him. It's "only till June," she says. Then he'll graduate and have a chance of college.

Father Flynn's explanation is that he’d caught the boy stealing drinks of the altar wine. He implies the boy did it because of the pressure he’s under. Sister Aloysius thinks Flynn gave the boy the wine. Donald must be relieved of his altar boy status. We never know what really too place.

What happens to Father Flynn is dramatic but not altogether bad. Nonetheless Doubt, for me much more on screen than on stage, is profoundly disturbing and leaves one shaken. It seemed to arouse painful memories of repression and cold authority figures that I experienced in school. Apparently one doesn't have to go to Catholic school to have Catholic school experiences. I confess that I have had contacts with nuns and Catholic priests, and they weren't happy.

The film has a vivid physicality the New York production lacked. You can almost smell the linoleum and the incense and hear the swish of the black gowns and the creak of the floors. The Catholic school world is not less vivid for being barren. Mrs. Muller and Sister James have very important roles in the play and the film. But since among other things Doubt is about a power struggle, you can see this as the duel to a draw of two great actors. Streep and Hoffman are virtuosos and they get to strut their stuff. Hoffman gives an unusually generous and complex performance. Hoffman, who tends to play depressed, dysfunctional men who can't cope, here has his warmest, most human role. Streep's role calls for narrowness--and her pinched, pointed features serve her well. It's funny to think that the same meanie in her played even better perhaps in the fashion queen of The Devil Wears Prada. But here she manages a dash of humanity too, behind the coldness. Considering her role’s ample opportunities to become caricature, her performance is restrained enough. In their climactic shouting-match battle both get too loud, but this is theater, not “reality.” Hoffman’s Father Flynn is a good man. Remarkably, Streep's Syster Aloysius is not a bad woman.

A paradox, not the only one, is that here is a member of the Catholic church trying to root out a pedophile priest, not cover up for one, as was the rule; but Father Flynn may be wrongly accused. It's also a paradox that Father Flynn seems the better person, but he may not be. He represents liberalism. He talks about love, smiling, bringing fun to the school and the community and making the school less like a "prison." Sister Aloysius is obviously a meanie, a tyrant--a gorgon. When she calls a boy up to her for discipline Flynn murmurs, "The dragon is hungry." But although Flynn looks better and is more appealing, it's still quite possible that Aloysius is right and Flynn is denying the truth when he says there was "nothing improper."

Doubt is a play. It's beautifully, powerfully done. It hasn't exactly been transformed into something truly cinematic. It does its job, as the play did, to shake us into a state of moral confusion, and maybe even awaken painful buried memories. It doesn't necessarily recreate a whole world or even a whole incident. Cinema, like theater, is magic, but also trickery, working with powerful hints.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.