Doubt - John Patrick Shanley

Statutory warning: This is not a film for those who like their movies all tied up in neat little bows of resolution. ‘Doubt’ lives up to its name admirably, leaving you with one long loose thread of just that. Most people will come away thinking they know the answer, but they will come across others with the opposite view, who also think they know the answer. Yet, neither side will be absolutely sure. And that’s where the power of ‘Doubt’ lies. Doubt is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley..

Statutory warning: This is not a film for those who like their movies all tied up in neat little bows of resolution. ‘Doubt’ lives up to its name admirably, leaving you with one long loose thread of just that. Most people will come away thinking they know the answer, but they will come across others with the opposite view, who also think they know the answer. Yet, neither side will be absolutely sure. And that’s where the power of ‘Doubt’ lies.

Doubt is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, and based on his Pulitzer Prize winning play. The stage is St. Nicholas school in the Bronx of the 1960s. The central players are Sister Aloysius, the stern, severe principal, played by Meryl Streep, Father Flynn, the forward thinking boys’ gym teacher, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Sister James, the young romantic history teacher, played by Amy Adams.

Sister Aloysius walks – make that, strides – on a cloud of imperious righteousness. Her beliefs are rigidly traditional (she thinks ballpoint pens are a modern evil), her manner unyielding and her rule over the children and teachers under her, absolute. In contrast, Father Flynn thinks nothing of eating meat on Fridays (gasp!), mingling with his congregation, and being both guide and friend to his students. What Father Flynn thinks of as progressive, Sister Aloysius considers depraved. The constant tug-of-war between their ideals is palpable, even when they’re not sharing the screen.

Just as we, the viewers, are placed and pulled between them, so is Sister James. Like Father Flynn, she encourages her students to think for themselves, recognises petty misbehaviour as just kids-being-kids and truly believes she can make a difference by sharing her love for the subjects she teaches. However, her almost-puppy-dog-like reverence for Sister Aloysius has her wondering if her romanticism is, in fact, just naiveté.

Sister James’ conflict – and our own – begins when Sister Aloysius tells her she suspects Father Flynn is getting inappropriately close to one of his altar boys, Donald Miller – the first and only black student in the school. She instructs the young teacher to keep her eyes open. Is Father Flynn simply reaching out to the boy to allay his fears and loneliness, or is he sexually abusing him? Sister Aloysius has had experience with a paedophiliac priest before and is soon sure it is the latter. Sister James is at first positive it is the former, but her superior’s certainty begins crawling into her head as doubt. And from that moment, Doubt is in our heads too, taking us first one way, and then another, and never telling us which side to stay on. That is left up to us to decide; and we decide by what we read in each character, and, I suspect, by the way in which we each view the world, the Church and the human race. The only one who will ever know for sure is the character, Father Flynn.

Some would argue that surely Shanley knows, for he must direct the actor who plays the priest one way or the other. I disagree. I think the actor must probably decide for himself whether to play Father Flynn as guilty or innocent, but I doubt Mr. Shanley knows which it should be. I suspect characters don’t always let their creators know everything about them.

There are those who would say that this sort of ambiguity is all well for the theatre, but has no place in film. I am not one of those. It is rare – and it is a pleasure – to encounter a film that is still winding its way through your mind days after you have seen the end credits roll.

However, there is a fault with many play-to-movie translations: they end up looking exactly like that – a play plonked onto the screen. Not in this case. Cinematographer Roger Deakins – a favourite of the Coen brothers – does a wonderful job of taking the scenery of Doubt beyond a stage prop, and making it a part of the experience with tones and backgrounds that mirror and enlarge the characters’ emotions, inner battles, and interactions.

It would be unfair to single out a performance from this movie. The spectacular turns put in by Streep, Hoffman and Adams could each warrant a thousand odd words of their own. However, I will mention one name, and it is none of these three. It is Viola Davis as Donald Miller’s mother. She has all of a few minutes on the screen – in a scene in which Sister Aloysius voices her suspicions to Mrs. Miller – but in those minutes, she manages to reach inside you and tear out your heart and gut in one of the most powerful scenes I have personally ever witnessed on film. It is also a scene that, in a shocking turn, displays the doubts that existed in the minds of the black community about their place and security in the age of Kennedy’s assassination and only-recently-revoked separatism – doubts that force Mrs. Miller to consider accepting what no mother should; what no human being should.

Doubt is like a great wind that grabs you off your nice safe ground, shakes you, picks you up and scatters you in the air, and leaves you to find your own place to land. I’m still not sure where to land. Let me know if you are.

Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in Doubt: