Doubt
Adapted from director John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, Doubt explores notions of tradition, truth and compassion, and demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of blind justice.
The film is set in and around the church of St Nicholas, a largely Irish-American parish in the Bronx of 1964 - a year after America’s first Catholic president was assassinated. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the jovial and kind-hearted Father Flynn, a modernising priest who believes the old orders should serve the wider church community with compassion, rather than sitting above the laity in moral aloofness. The austere Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who runs the parish school, represents the old guard. Feared by staff and pupils alike, she believes she must protect the children in her charge from a corrupt and rapidly changing world, which means no dancing, no ballpoint pens and certainly no secular songs.
The opening scene illustrates the tension between the old, narrow order embodied by Sister Aloysius and the new, neighbourly theology of Father Flynn. The flaxen-haired priest preaches an informal sermon about how shared doubt can often bring people into closer unity than strongly held convictions, while the reedy nun stalks the aisles in her long, black habit, ready to box the ear of any inattentive youngsters.
When one day the kindly, young nun Sister James (Amy Adams) reports that Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), the only black boy in the school, has returned to class shaken after a meeting with Father Flynn in the rectory, Sister Aloysius is immediately suspicious of the jovial priest’s intent, and accuses Flynn of abusing the boy.
However, this is not a film about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church; rather it concerns the battle between doubt and certainty. Sister Aloysius is absolutely convinced of her rectitude, yet director John Patrick Shanley never gives us any real evidence that Flynn could be an abuser, and even Sister James comes to believe in his innocence. But Sister Aloysius is resolute, and Flynn’s fate becomes the subject of an intense battle of wills.
In a morally ambiguous sequence, Sister Aloysius calls in Donald’s mother, knowing that parental pressure will seal her colleague’s fate. Little does she realise that in order to protect Donald from his physically abusive father, Mrs Miller (Viola Davis) would put up with almost anything that Flynn might have done. This is Davis’ only major scene, but it is also the film’s emotional core, bringing a harsh slice of reality into a rarefied world as she attempts to protect her son from scandal.
Originally written for the stage, one of the film’s chief pleasures is in watching two of the world’s most accomplished actors wrangle with each other, Hoffman in measured exasperation, Streep brandishing her cross like a dagger. Amy Adams also puts in a touching performance as the sweet-natured idealist, Sister James.
