John Patrick Shanley directs his own script, based on his Pulitzer prize winning play about the rivalry between a nun and a priest at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964.
Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) grows suspicious of Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) when he takes a special interest in the life of a young black student. He denies her charges of molestation. A young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), finds herself torn between the two authority figures, unsure of who to trust.
79%220 reviews
Doubt is a film in which intellectual thought is prized over cinematic satisfaction. Its origin as a stage play is evident - few characters, limited locations, brevity and lots of talking. While this sort of translation can often make for involving drama, in this case the adaptation for the screen feels like something of a neutered theoretical exercise.
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Doubt, which on the page burns with stark simplicity, has gotten a little cluttered in the translation. But if you want to see remarkable screen acting, ignore the howling wind and watch these faces.
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Doubt doesn't work fully on screen as it did on stage, but it's worth seeing for Streep's grace notes.
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Doubt is only marginally, and tendentiously, about moral uncertainty--it's more about the sins of a nosy old biddy who pulls out all the stops when going through the official channels of a male-dominated Catholic Church would get her nowhere.
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Doubt has exact and merciless writing, powerful performances and timeless relevance. It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film.
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It's a triumph of production design - you can practically smell the floor polish and the starch on the linen - and Boston in winter never looked so bleak and cheerless. But in the end this is a film for people who like plays - in particular if they pronounce "theatre" as three syllables.
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Shanley seems to have lost a certain amount of faith in what he'd written. As a director he's ended up pushing the drama harder than he needs to. He hasn't done anything fatal, but he has tampered with and hampered it.
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Doubt is available to stream in New Zealand now on Apple TV and AroVision.
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