Susan Granger’s review of “Doubt” (Miramax Films)
Adapting playwright John Patrick Shanley’s award-winning play about pedophilia within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was a challenge %u2013 one that Shanley himself attempts %u2013 with some degree of success. It’s 1964 at St. Nicholas parochial school in the Bronx, where authoritarian Sister Aloysius’s Beauvier (Meryl Streep) inflexible certitude strikes terror in the mostly Irish and Italian parish. So when trusting Sister James (Amy Adams) expresses concern that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) might be taking a special interest in Donald (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first black student, Sister Aloysius’s suspicions are aroused. To her, innovative Father Flynn embodies indulgences that she abhors, like delivering folksy sermons, dumping three lumps of sugar in his tea and using a ballpoint pen instead of a proper fountain pen. So after a pivotal encounter with Donald’s troubled mother (Viola Davis), who reveals the emotional reality of her son’s life, a crackling confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn is inevitable. Directing for the first time since his ill-fated “Joe Versus the Volcano,” Shanley retains the verbal integrity of his drama and opens it up cinematically, showing the socio-cultural context of the conflict. Yet he loses the dramatic intensity. While Hoffman captures the ambiguity necessary to make one unsure about Father Flynn, in a rare melodramatic misstep, Streep seems more of a frightening-yet-funny caricature than a woman-in-conflict – at least until her concluding line of dialogue. I suspect that if deft Broadway director Doug Hughes had the helm with Cherry Jones and Brian F. O’Byrne, who were perfectly matched, “Doubt” could have been an Oscar shoo-in. Nevertheless, on the Granger Movie Gauge, “Doubt” is an enigmatic 8. Did the priest actually molest the boy? All the ‘facts’ exist in the eye of the beholder. It’s your decision.
