Film Review: “Doubt,” Written and Directed by John Patrick Shanley

Whenever an acclaimed play transfers to the big screen, the first thing cineastes want to know is if it’s been “opened up,” and skeptics fall back on their invariable cliché in such situations that it’s too “talky.” Reactions to Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, are no exception—partly because the screenwriter-playwright’s rookie film directorial effort, Joe Versus the Volcano, turned out to be such a disaster that he walked away from Hollywood for the next 18 years.

Well, even the best directors—Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, you name it—had at least one misfire on their illustrious resumes. The margin for error for a playwright-director seems smaller because, supposedly, he’s concerned first and foremost with words rather than moving pictures that, every devotee of film studies courses will tell you, are the essence of cinema.

Here’s my advice: See Doubt without any preconceptions. In that way, you’ll not only have the best opportunity to judge it correctly, but you’ll also heed one of its central lessons: Approach a person or event with as little as possible of personal baggage.

“All well and good,” you say. “But what did you think of the film?”

(Sigh.) I found the movie well-written, (mostly) acted convincingly, and compelling in dissecting the sexual-abuse crisis that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church in the last six years. (The problem existed long before that, of course: I choose the date 2002 because that’s when it exploded on the front pages of The Boston Globe and its sister daily in the Times Co., The New York Times—the latter being especially crucial, since a story there sets the agenda for smaller papers as well as TV coverage.)

The plot centers on the suspicions harbored by a principal that a parish priest might have molested the Bronx parochial school’s lone black student. Like an old-school cop, with no illusions about human nature but plenty of prejudices, Sister Aloysius (played by Meryl Streep) is convinced she can sweat the truth out of Fr. Brendan (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Resisting the Urge for Heroes and Villains

Like Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Doubt superficially employs a detective-story format (with Sister Aloysius as the investigator) to explore themes of sin, guilt, hubris, and man’s relationship to God. Set in 1964—one year after the deaths of the beloved Catholic “two Johns” (Pope John XXIII and President John F. Kennedy)—it portrays an American, primarily immigrant-driven Church at a moment of deceptive self-confidence—just before the ferocious energies of the Sixties will sweep all the certainties away—and, we know now, already well into the period in which the crimes of errant priests were being covered up by archbishops. (I have always maintained that this is not a priest-abuse crisis but an archbishop-coverup one.)

Despite the presence of Oscar-winners Streep and Hoffman to lend the project box-office appeal (not to mention Academy Award potential), I’m still stunned—and delighted—that a film of this type even got produced. For it flies right in the face of Hollywood’s tendency to serve up films with all-too-familiar heroes and villains, along with easy answers.

(In making Dead Man Walking, for instance, Tim Robbins was begged by studio heads to make the murderer on whom the film was based into an innocent man in the film—and, when that didn’t work, not to show the murders for which he was convicted, lest it dilute audience sympathy for him. Luckily, Robbins didn’t listen.)

The culture wars—not to mention a real one since 9/11—has only exacerbated this mindset that sees everything in black and white. Doubt will have none of that.

Conservatives would have you think that the sex-abuse scandals resulted from the presence of homosexuals being winked at in seminaries during the Sixties and Seventies, while liberals point to celibacy and an all-male hierarchy as the root causes. With people as well as with issues, it’s all supposed to be easy to sort out. Only it isn’t.

Sister Aloysius seems the very epitome of the type of hellfire-and-damnation, sin-obsessed church that so many rebelled against in the Sixties and Seventies, and Fr. Brendan—with his call for openness and belief that doubt might open the way to truth—the exemplar of the spirit of Vatican II. And it sure seems that his worldliness—not just his affection for the young student, but even such exotic personal details as his long fingernails and his penchant for extra helpings of sugar in his tea—provokes her suspicions as much as anything he’s actually done.

But what happens when the “liberal” priest is confronted with her suspicions? He falls back on the very thing he would be the first to denounce: the oath of obedience she swore to the male hierarchy, including him. So he’s guilty.

But is he? Or is he guilty of something else? Shanley’s cleverly constructed script overturns presumptions about character based on issues or appearances. Both prey and quarry, it turns out, have something to hide—and, in the end, some manner of doubt.

A Religious Battle of the Sexes

Think of Sister Aloysius-Father Brendan faceoff as a radical variation on the priest-nun clash given life by Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s. I have heard it argue--convincingly, I think--that this 1945 sequel to Going My Way is, in fact, a coded love story, marked by misunderstanding between two people who should be perfectly matched to each other, until a form of perfect (though chaste, mind you!) love exists between them by the end.

Look past the conventions of Hollywood storytelling, however, and you’ll see that director Leo McCarey depicts a real-life, long-running tug of war going on between the nuns who largely operated the parochial schools and the priests who controlled their purse strings—and, unfortunately, were also called on to (in consultation with the hierarchy) on whether or not to close them. The two sides not only viewed matters from radically different worldviews, but in a number of cases, the power dynamic was affected by sexism.

You cannot view this film without that resonating in the background, along with the issues of character that we all bring to bear on judgment.

Directorial Hits and Misses

As a director using his camera to buttress or counterpoint his own script, Shanley has his share of hits and misses. A scene of a dark, windy day too bluntly symbolizes storms about to sweep through America and the American Church in the 1960s.

On the other hand, he nicely frames the contrast between Fr. Brendan and Sister Aloysius in the opening scene, when shots of the liberal priest delivering a sermon are juxtaposed with the nun roaming up and down the side aisle, scanning the pews for youthful slackers and troublemakers—a hint of their eventual conflict. A confrontation in the principal’s office turns into a carefully choreographed glimpse at who had the upper hand, as priest and principal take turns moving into the chair behind her desk and making each other uncomfortable.

Because the film doesn’t make you gasp over its stunts a la the Indiana Jones and James Bond franchises or marvel at its use of makeup as in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, its success rests to a large extent on the credibility of its actors. Though all four of the major actors in this movie have been nominated for Academy Awards, some are more deserving than others. Below, in ascending order of accomplishment and conviction, are those performers:

* Philip Seymour Hoffman—While never really hitting a false note, he also never makes you think it impossible for any other actor to take on this role, as he did in supporting turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley or his Oscar-winning performance in Capote.

* Meryl Streep—We’ve always known she’s a master at Berlitz-style accents, but what this film registers strongly is the way her face can register conflicting emotions, even as her character pushes relentlessly for what she believes is certain.

* Amy Adams—In any other year, her performance as Sister James (based on Shanley’s first-grade teacher, Sister Margaret McEntee, a Sister of Charity who served as a technical consultant on the film) would be a virtual shoo-in for an Oscar, based on the quality of the work here along with her rising standing with Academy voters. This year, Adams is likely to see her votes split with another cast member in this category. Too bad: her role is pivotal as a novice whose innocence is lost as she becomes caught in the tug of war between Sister Aloysius, her superior in school and the convent, and Father Brendan, whose optimistic view of human nature accords with her own.

* Viola Davis—Her small role is small but riveting as the mother of the student whose relationship with Fr. Brendan has been called into question. It’s the type—not too many minutes of screen time, but conveyed with maximum impact—for which the Best Supporting Actor and Actress Awards were created. She brings a kind of desperate fortitude to the role of a woman willing to overlook a possible transgression by a priest who might still be the best chance her son has to escape the cycle of prejudice and poverty to which African-Americans were assigned at the time.

In a recent interview with “Studio 360” of the New York public radio station, WNYC-FM, Shanley spoke of the time in which he wrote the play—the run-up to the invasion of Iraq—and how little questioning or doubt took place at that point. In this view, the film becomes a grander metaphorical questioning of the assumptions of authority.

It’s natural that Shanley would want to escape from a strictly—to pardon the pun—parochial view of his work. Nevertheless, his film has captured a particular time and place with great subtlety (watch, for instance, the contrast between the bonhomie of the priests’ dining table and the silent, more austere world of nuns from the time). Most of all, he has honored his characters by treating them not as mouthpieces for particular points of view (including his own, whatever that might be) but as people tangled up not just in their well-formed ideology but in their internal contradictions.

The sex-abuse crisis has introduced a level of doubt about people and events from their youth that never existed before. Doubt shows how maddening, if necessary, this self-examination can be.