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Doubt

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Cert: 15

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Dir: John Patrick Shanley. Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Joseph Foster II

 

Description: Sister Aloysius runs her '60s Catholic school with an iron fist. Trouble erupts when Sister Aloysius learns from painfully naive Sister James that Father Flynn has "taken an interest" in one of the boys, Donald Miller. When the head nun learns that Father Flynn spent time alone in the rectory with Donald, she draws unsavoury conclusions and confronts the man of God, determined to bully him into a confession of guilt. Instead, he pleads innocence and the situation spirals out of control when Sister Aloysius contacts Donald's mother to apprise her of the supposed facts of the case.

Country: US. 2008. 104mins

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Meryl gets in on sister act in Doubt

 

Nun fiction: Sister James (Amy Adams) and the headmistress Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep)

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There are times when Meryl Streep seems a genuinely great screen presence, and others when she draws attention to herself in so mannered a way that she drowns the film she’s in.

In John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his highly successful Broadway play she plays Sister Aloysius, the battering- ram headmistress of a Brooklyn school. She terrifies her pupils, browbeats Amy Adams’s idealistic young nun and loathes the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Father Flynn — which is understandable once you’ve had to sit through his portentous sermons with titles such as “What do you do when you’re not sure?”.

Sister Aloysius accuses him of tampering with a young black altar boy at the school, and at first it seems a ridiculous slur. Later, however, we are asked to believe that Father Flynn might just be a closet pederast and the boy a burgeoning gay. But we are never quite sure — and Shanley doesn’t tell us.

Though perfectly decently shot, the film still resembles an old-fashioned problem play, like one of those beautifully fashioned Terence Rattigan potboilers of the Fifties. That would be all right if it were cast more satisfactorily. But Streep’s almost Hitlerian certainties (based, we finally learn, on deep-set religious doubts) and Hoffman’s almost saintly presence tip it over into a quiet kind of melodrama. You just want to tell the pair of them to go away and bite each other on the neck in private.

Doubt is not really about abuse at all, but about the Catholic Church’s attempts to reform under the aegis of the previous Pope — the action takes place well before it was discovered that a significant proportion of America’s Catholic priests systematically abused their young charges, altar boys or not.

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Still, when it first came out on Broadway, some thought it was also trying to shed moral light on the question of whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in his armoury. What do you do, indeed, when you’re not sure?
Doubt thinks it is raising probing questions about faith, doubt, guilt and innocence but actually uncovers very little. Even when the final third at last brings the thing to life it remains a clunky piece of theatre trying to be cinema, and does not make the most of what ought to be rather frightening and ultimately moving material.

Despite the praise accorded them across the water (both Streep and Hoffman are Oscar-nominated), none of the three principals is at their best. Streep overplays, Hoffman is curiously dull and Adams appears merely as a foolish girl.

Only Viola Davis, as the weary working mother of the possibly abused boy, really brings home the uncomfortable fact that the young can be battened on by the old (not just with sexual abuse) and often ruined for life.

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