Doubt

There are films of dramatic subtlety and then there are films like Doubt. The metaphors are heavy-handed. When the drama elevates, it's always raining. And canted frames are constant, as if that is the only way the audience can understand that things are not quite right. The adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer prize-winning play, adapted by Shanley himself, remains stagy in its form and his attempts to add visual allure by means of showy technique only distracts from the far stronger source material. I'm sure sitting alone in a dark editing suite, Shanley reasoned his rampant overhead shots were some complex allusion to a divine onlooker, relevant to the film's Catholic school setting, but to the audience in the theater it seems to simply allude to the fact that Shanley was like a kid with a camera while making this film.

What makes the film watchable, and yes, sometimes riveting are the phenomenal performances by its esteemed cast. Meryl Streep stars as Sister Aloysius, the head strong principal of a Catholic grade school in 1963 New York. When it is brought to her attention by the warmly innocent Sister James (Amy Adams) that a young boy was brought to the rectory and seemed strange afterward, she very quickly and adamantly takes to the notion of wrongdoing on behalf of the parish priest, Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). Flynn insists it was a misunderstanding but Siter Aloysius persists in her investigation of his character and in two very memorable scenes confronts the mother of the boy in question (Viola Davis) who gives her a shocking and heartbreaking response. No satisfying evidence is presented by either side of the contest and in the end the battle becomes not a matter of justice but a trial of wills between the congenial and eccentric priest and the rigidly traditional nun nipping at his heals.

Shanley's writing, which is far better than his directing here, can be refreshingly ambiguous and quite tart in its earlier, subtler moments, which are mercifully interspersed with light humor. The verbal cat and mouse between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn is often engrossing and unexpectedly funny. By film's end, though, Streep and Hoffman are reduced to yelling and screaming (while the thunder rolls on, of course) and all the tension dissipates instead of climaxing. The piece falls too often into such histrionic melodrama that only the most enraptured audience members are likely avoid the feeling of having swallowed a bitter pill.

Grade: B-