Doubt: 104 minutes. Rated: M. Director: John Patrick Shanley. Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
In the world of cinema, religious figures can make for easy targets. At times, they are caricatured as overly pious, seemingly too attuned to their God to keep touch with the humanity or the changing times around them. Often, they are the rats in the ranks, whose piety is a veil for their own corruptness, self-interest, or dark and damaging secrets.
In an age where distrust of religious institutions runs high, and where that distrust is due in no small part to revelations of child abuse perpetrated by members of the clergy, portrayals of priests can tend to lean towards the weak or villainous.
Doubt deals with the subject of clergy child abuse, though not in
the way you might expect. Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, it's not concerned with caricature and
cliché, far less with polemic (if that's what you're after, try the
2007 documentary Deliver Us From Evil), but rather is a finely wrought, character-driven drama where ambiguities abound and truth remains elusive.
Hoffman is Father Brendan Flynn, a charismatic, approachable priest,
who is in charge of the local parish. He's the foil to Streep's
hard-nosed headmistress, Sister Aloysius, who is cynical about Father
Flynn's progressive ways.
Father Flynn has taken a particular interest in Donald Miller (Joseph
Foster), a young African-American student and altar boy, who is
somewhat ostracised in the all-white student body. They are close —
perhaps too close, in the bright but naïve eyes of young nun and
schoolteacher, Sister James (Adams), who immediately brings her
concerns to Sister Aloysius.
On the slimmest of pretexts, fuelled by her own dubious and malicious
instincts — and, to be fair, concern for the alleged victim — Sister
Aloysius launches a vendetta against Father Flynn, convinced of his
guilt, and determined to have him removed at all costs.
Shanley's adaptation of his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play is an intriguing study of guilt and deceit. It is bracketed by monologues about doubt. The former takes the shape of a homily; the latter, an admission of guilt, though by whom I won't say.
But the most insidious 'doubt' that pervades the film relates to the kinds of images and feelings that can spring to mind when considering the portrayal of religious authorities in film or media. The unsettling events of the plot play in to the doubts of the film's