Doubt (***3/4)

Since I saw this movie, I’ve seen a preview for it that makes Meryl Streep’s nun character look like a shrew trying to railroad a forward-thinking priest, and a television commercial that makes her seem like a crusader for justice working against a male hierarchy that would like to whitewash the truth. These attempts to shoehorn the plot into mutually exclusive thrillers inadvertently point to the brilliance of director John Patrick Shanley’s tightly constructed script. Streep, who plays a primary-school headmistress, seems to embody the sort of nasty old Catholic school nun that makes up clichés about nasty old Catholic school nuns.

Invoking fear in both students and her fellow sisters, she is almost a caricature of sternness, so conservative that in 1964 she still cannot abide ballpoint pens. When she suspects something untoward about the kindness of the priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) toward the school’s only black student, is she not simply biased against his more liberal theology? Turn the question around and it becomes, does being biased, or not likeable, make her wrong? In the end, this movie is a drama, not a thriller, and the title is exactly on point. So the question is not whether the priest is guilty but how sure of herself does her accuser need to be before going forward, when being wrong in either direction may have significant consequences.

In the most emotional scene of the movie, the student’s mother spells out some of the less-expected consequences. Viola Davis, in this small role, nearly steals the scene from Streep, who is nonetheless quite good. (Additionally, her character turns out to be more complex than she seems, though the very last line of the movie still seems out of character, and unsubtle.) Amy Adams, well cast as a younger nun, serves as an audience surrogate whose sympathies and suspicions battle each other.

Shanley won an Oscar for writing 1987’s Moonstruck, but his only directorial effort was 1990’s offbeat Joe Versus the Volcano. Neither of those movies would prepare you for this adaptation of Shanley’s play, which has already copped both a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shanley hasn’t taken great efforts to “open up” the play, though it makes lovely use of period locations and detail in evoking the Brooklyn of 1964. It’s a cinch for a screenplay Oscar nomination as well.

IMDB link

viewed 12/2/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 12/18/08