Doubt (2008)

Doubt came to the big screen with some seriously formidable talent behind it, but don’t be lulled into expecting pretentious High Art. Forget for a moment that it’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer- and Tony-Award winning stage play. Forget that it stars two heavyweight master thespians in Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Forget that it is bathed in the occasionally claustrophobic hues of Oscar-bait mystique.

Strip away all that and Doubt is essentially a parlor mystery. A stern nun at a Catholic school suspects that a priest is having an inappropriate relationship with an altar boy. Is the priest a pedophile or a man of God helping a troubled child? Are the nun’s fears founded or has mother superior jumped the gun?

Set in the Bronx in 1964, Doubt unfolds when school principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep) begins to suspect that all is not well at St. Nicholas Catholic School, which she rules with a severity usually reserved for boot camp. She harbors serious doubt (what a good name for a movie!) about the amiable, progressive-minded Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman). The sister bristles when Flynn exhorts the church to be more approachable, but she reserves most of her scorn for the “interest” he takes in the welfare of the school’s first Black student, 12-year-old Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II). Her worst fears seem confirmed when she learns that Donald reeked of alcohol after a private meeting with Father Flynn.

So begins a battle of wills between a priest and a nun with diametrically opposed ideas about discipline, the Catholic Church … even the lyrics to “Frosty the Snowman.” Sister Aloysius vows that the father will confess the wrongdoing that he so adamantly denies. “It’s my job to outshine the fox in cleverness,” she tells Sister James (Amy Adams), an impressionable teacher caught in the middle.

Director John Patrick Shanley, who also wrote the script based on his own play, nicely expands the work from its four-character origins, but he doesn’t sacrifice the tension. Despite the distraction of some canted camera angles, an effect that seems more appropriate for student films than mainstream Hollywood, Doubt maintains its stage roots.

And that’s fine. Doubt is polished and sharply observed, the dialogue piquant, and the vividly drawn characters a feast for actors up to the task. There is some lip service paid to the concepts of doubt and certainty (“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty,” Flynn booms from the pulpit), but the movie is more wickedly entertaining than it is thematically weighty.

Shanley has assembled a knockout cast. Hoffman imbues Flynn with ambiguity. The priest has an open-faced affability tempered by fissures of melancholy. Adams’ sweetness is not cloying. As Donald’s mother, Viola Davis has only one scene, but it’s a stunner and was enough to earn her am Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Best of all is Streep. Sister Aloysius Beauvier is a force of nature, a barely contained vessel of rabid righteousness. It is a big, fat, scenery-chewing performance. And it is glorious.