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Doubt

Suspicious Mind

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt

It probably wasn’t all my fault that my mind strayed to recollections of Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman during John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. In fact, if there’s any blame to assign, I think Shanley should share in it.

He’s adapted and directed a film version of his own award-winning play about the clash between a severely hard-nosed nun and a warmly genial and popular priest at a Bronx Catholic school in 1964. These two servants of their faith are separated from each other and at cross purposes by virtue of their respective genders, stations, personalities, and theological tendencies.

Which put me in mind of Bing and Bergman. In the mid-1940s, those two starred in The Bells of St. Mary’s, Leo McCarey’s family comedy about a Catholic school principal (Bergman) whose conventional, by-the-book educational methods are in danger of being frustrated by the arrival of Crosby’s casually charming Father O’Malley and his more liberal, cut-the-kids-some-slack approach. Bing sings a couple of songs, there’s some limited soul-searching, and these differences are resolved by the picture’s end.

Alas, Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn’t sing in Doubt, and things don’t work out well for anybody. What’s eventually at issue between him and the school principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), is a lot more viscerally disturbing than opposing pedagogical styles. She comes to suspect him of molesting a 12-year-old boy, the school’s first “negro” pupil (Joseph Foster), and she begins a quiet but relentless campaign to nail Flynn for this. She lacks hard evidence but her instincts, suspicion, and “certainty” are enough to fuel her efforts.

Shanley has primed Aloysius to react with steely certitude. Soon after we first encounter these two, he’s registering a mildly amused, barely suppressed condescension toward the nun and her fearsome, iron-gloved disciplinary regime. He even makes a softly jocular reference to this “dragon” to young Sister James (Amy Adams), a guilelessly hopeful history teacher who will unwittingly hand Aloysius her pretext for action.

Flynn’s self-confident expansiveness is grounded in the tightly interwoven privileges of his sex and his office. Shanley is rather good at evoking this soft-edged institutional hierarchy. In one scarcely subtle but sharply telling juxtaposition of scenes, the film contrasts the conversationally and culinarily austere dinner hour of Aloysius and her sisters with the parish priests’ hearty masculine camaraderie and the much more luxurious table set for them. Aloysius’ resentment has been nourished in this environment, even if she doesn’t really recognize this. For her, Flynn represents the already degenerate influences of 1960s social change. And following behind is Vatican II.

When James confides some minor disquietude about the African-American boy’s odd behavior after his meeting with the priest, Aloysius’ mind snaps shut on one interpretation and she complains bitterly, “Here there’s no man I can turn to; men run everything!”

The film’s signal aspect may be the showcase opportunities it offers its two stars and they’ve risen to the occasion. Streep’s Aloysius is a frightening gothic figure of implacability. If her performance shades into caricature now and then, it’s probably partly in response to the script, and she adds a few notes of practical shrewdness as well. Hoffman is called upon to build more gradually to an angry recognition of the challenge this foe poses for him, and he manages it with impressive skill. But curiously, the most interesting and humanely compelling confrontation in the film isn’t between the two major antagonists but the one that ensues when Aloysius tries to enlist the boy’s mother (Viola Davis in a strikingly insightful turn) in her cause and is brought smack-up against a couple of life’s exigent realities.

If Shanley has persuasively rendered the social and psychological tenor of this semi-isolated religious setting, he’s rather less effective in delivering on his underlying ambition. He wants to impart a philosophical lesson, but his film never really escapes the bounds of standard dramatic conflict. In a preface to the published edition of his play, he calls it a parable, and writes of the “age-old practice of the wise—doubt.” Flynn delivers a homily in which he extols doubt as a sacred “bond.” But Shanley’s metaphysics amount to little more than melodramatic stuff and a muddled, middlebrow high mindedness.

Aloysius’ real sin is her adamantly narrow-minded pursuit, but Shanley has actually given her some reason for suspicion. At its very end, Doubt fizzles out in an arbitrary capitulation to Shanley’s purported theme. (So does the play, but it may work better since actors on stage can sometimes dominate their material.)

I left the movie theatre harboring a retrogressive longing for Bing and Bergman to come back and patch things up for everybody.



Watch the movie trailer for Doubt


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