A film review by Craig J. Koban |
||
Rank: #6 |
||
DOUBT
Sister Aloysius: Meryl Streep / Father Flynn: Philip Seymour
Hoffman / Sister James: Amy Adams / Mrs. Miller: Viola Davis
/ Donald: Joseph Foster II |
||
"When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God." Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) in DOUBT
John Patrick Shanley’s DOUBT is one of the most painstakingly and provocatively observant character dramas that I have seen in a long while. The easy label for the film – based on Shanley’s own 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning Off-Broadway play – would be to call it a hot button message flick that is designed to incite polarizing discussions from movie goers…which it will most certainly do. However, a keener eye would observe that the real crowning achievement of DOUBT is that it daringly parades around its oftentimes-difficult terrain with a skillful, almost deceptive, ambiguity.
The
title of the film is simple, to the point, and has far reaching
implications for both its characters and viewers: it discretely suggests
the preponderance of doubt that certain people struggle with when dealing
with desperately proving the truth to a terrible accusation against another,
but it also pertains to the more ethereal doubts that we all experience
during times of profound social and political uncertainty in the world.
It’s hard for people to have absolute certainty in a world when moral
uncertainty is the norm. The
film’s trailer showcases that DOUBT is about a fiercely determined nun
that attempts – come hell or high water – to prove to all around her
that her Church’s well-respected priest is a child seducer and molester.
Yet, Shanley’s film goes well beyond its TV-movie-of-the week
facade; on basic levels, it deals with the issues of pedophilia in the
priesthood, to be sure, but the film also is a much more nuanced in
looking at so many other subtle themes that manage to creep in: the social
environment and norms of a rigidly run Catholic school in the 1960’s,
the sexual politics and blatant sexism that occurred in the Catholic
Church, and how societal catastrophes of the times had a near paralyzing
affect of people.
With calamities like Vietnam, JFK’s killing, and civil discord on
the home front, DOUBT quietly suggests how the overall historical period
undermined peoples’ faith in general.
In large part, DOUBT delicately maneuvers around its plot of a vile
allegation against a priest and becomes something more engrossing and
transfixing.
In a way, it becomes a meditation on human motives and emotional
fragility and, more crucially, is cautionary for the manner it shows how
being absolutely unwavering in your own convictions of righteousness can
be a very dangerous force. Perhaps
the finest compliment to bestow upon Shanley’s work here is that he
manages to do everything mentioned all while allowing DOUBT to be a keenly
intricate and frequently unnerving study of its flawed personas.
The film is an actor’s paradise in the way it allows us to be
drawn to securely in for its 104 minutes and forces us to pay strict
attention to every minute detail of the individual performances.
The film is so assuredly lean on this level: no emotion is phoned
in or manufactured, no line of dialogue is superfluous or unnecessary,
and certainly no moment in the film feels false.
To a large extent, the inner suspense and intrigue of the film is
not so much in its whodunit storyline, but more with how it shows the
close-quartered verbal cat and mouse games its characters engage in
throughout.
Almost all of the people that populate the film are intensely
vigilant with one another at one point or another, which is why DOUBT
emerges as a supremely interpretive film: Refreshingly, black and white
questions are asked with simple answers rarely being provided.
The direct outcome of the film is curiously open to speculation,
and Shanley is smart enough not to specifically leave us with a resounding
sensation that everything has been settled on a satisfactory level.
The painfully unsettling feeling of not knowing the true nature of
one character in DOUBT is what ultimate makes the film rise above routine
period drama and to that of an enigmatic examination of faith in general. Rarely
has a film’s setting and time been so instrumental in its story and
themes.
Yes, attacks against the Catholic priesthood are commonplace today,
but back in 1964 sex abuse scandals were largely ignored.
The 60’s – as a time ripe for civil rights change – are also
crucial for helping to typify the relationships between men and women in
the Church (where men – priest and pastors – ruled supreme and
believed that women – nuns – should know their obedient place under
them).
This thematic tandem allows for our innate investment in the
underlining story: It's 1964 in the Bronx and we are introduced to a
Catholic School and the Father the presides over it, Flynn (Phillip
Seymour Hoffman).
The beginning of the film opens quietly with a sermon he gives to
the masses on the nature of doubt (highly fitting) and how it – much
like faith – can be a source of unifying people together towards the
common good.
Later that evening the school’s vindictively strict head nun and
principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) discusses the sermon with her
fellow nuns, one that includes a young and sometimes naïve newcomer,
Sister James (Amy Adams).
Aloysius finds the Father’s choice of topics compelling, if not a
bit odd.
She asks her fellow nuns for their interpretation of the meaning of
the sermon and then concludes that they may be more than meets the eye
when it comes to his words.
More specifically, she asks he colleagues to keep a close eye on
Father Flynn for any hint of possible wrongdoing. Perhaps there is more
to Sister Aloysius suspicions than
she lets on to her peers. She
becomes utterly infatuated with the notion of catching the outwardly noble
and decent minded Father in an act of insubordination. Why? Perhaps
it has something to do with the fact that she rules her students with a
cool and ruthlessly unemotional restraint more
akin to a prison warden, which is something that the calm and more
approachable Father does not like. The
sister is a fierce creature of habit and norms, and seeing the Father’s
almost loose
and
easygoing charm that
he
exhibits with students is highly off-putting
to her.
She simply does not like this man and
despises his progressive views,
his liberal minded sermons, and
his relative closeness
with the monsignor (something she never really has with her fellow nuns,
as Shanely brilliantly shows in two dinner scenes juxtaposed between one
another), and she really does not like the fact that the priest thinks
that her tactics and methods are right out of the Dark Ages.
Maybe Flynn has a point: Sister Aloysius’ effortless manner of
elicited innate fear in her students has become legendary in the school.
Only newcomer Sister James is offered up as the antithesis of
Aloysius’ mean-spirited fear-mongering, as she is a kind and gentle soul
that believes she can get better results making kids think that she cares
for them. Sister James’ educational philosophy soon takes a hit during one day when she notices that the school’s painfully shy, introverted, and friendless African American student and altar boy, Donald (Joseph Foster II) has returned to her class from the Father’s office in a rather distressed state. Worst of all, she believes that she smells alcohol on the boy’s breath. Her doubts about Father Flynn’s relationship for the troubled youth takes a real turn for the worse when she then catches Flynn placing the boy’s undershirt back in his locker. She timidly approaches Sister Aloysius, but she is so unreservedly sickened by the thought of Flynn being a man of impropriety that she would stop at nothing to prove his innocence. This makes Aloysius cringe. James rather ineffectually states, “I don’t believe that Flynn did anything wrong,” to which the incredulous Aloysius responds, “You just want things resolved so you can have simplicity back.” The
scene shows how two of the finest and most respected actors of their
generations feed off of one another so precisely and with such poise,
determination, and tactful timing.
Lazy critics have complained that Meryl Streep’s work here as the
stern and verbally cruel head nun is a camera-mugging caricature, but if
you look closely this is a performance where every glance, physical
gesture, and choice and tone of words are modulated to careful precision.
This is a character that easily invites outward hostility from
viewers, but it’s a true testament to Streep’s incredible range as an
actress to get into the mindset of this woman and make us empathize with
her (yes, she is a cast iron bitch in black garb with steely eyes and a
constant frown, but this is also a woman with a complicated history that
feels suffocated by how men in her line of work all but subjugate her).
Her somewhat diminutive position under Flynn and men in general in
the Church is no excuse for her intense hatred of Flynn, but it gives us a
window into her emotional state, not to mention that it allows us to more
fully grasp what it means for a woman of her time to truly stand up to a
male superior and seek the truth without going through proper channels.
Streep is as raw and convincing as she’s ever been in DOUBT; this
is one of her most outstanding and challenging roles. The
other supporting performances are equally astounding.
Hoffman has arguably the most difficult part in the film portraying
a man that may or may not be guilty of an unforgivably crime, but the
amazing thing about his choices with Flynn is that he never oversells a
scene to overtly tip our suspicions over to one side.
Like Streep’s nun, he is a man so driven and forthright that it
becomes difficult to believe that he’s anything but innocent.
Amy Adams also has a very tricky part as Sister James that has to
journey from being a somewhat impressionable and hopelessly green nun to
one that begins to share Aloysius’s doubts, even when the comfort of
thinking Flynn is innocent has such an overpower aura over her.
And then there is an totally heart-wrenching and poignantly soulful
performance by Viola Davies as the African boy’s mother, that brings
another added layer of emotional complexity and moral uncertainty to DOUBT
in her brief – but utterly unforgettable – scene where
Aloysius confronts her with her suspicions of Flynn’s wrongdoing.
Her response is both shocking and incredibly moving: Much like
Aloysius, she is a woman imprisoned by gender inequities of the time, but
her race also is an added barrier to ensuring her son’s success.
Davies so fully inhibits this disturbed and distressed woman with
such a touching and sad sincerity that the Academy should not overlook
despite the briefness of it.
Shanley is no stranger to praise both on stage and in front of a film camera (on top of the Pulitzer, he won an Oscar for his 1987 screenplay for MOONSTRUCK) and his meticulously clever, frequently moving, and psychological and thematically complex DOUBT will most assuredly garner – and deserve – serious Oscar consideration. It goes out of its way to show that all of the glossy pyrotechnics and flash-bang CGI artifice is nothing when compared to riveting and compelling characters, ferociously committed and rooted performances, and a fiendishly smart and savvy script that has the foresight to let viewers draw their own conclusions instead of having them slavishly spelt out to them. Lazy films, in my mind, offer quick and cathartic relief, much like easily digestible feel-good food. DOUBT has the opposite and more intrinsically fascinating reaction: It forces us to look within ourselves, challenge own inherent uncertainties and doubts, and allows us to make our own connections and conclusions. The sheer brilliance of the film is that there are two distinct possibilities to entertain in the story and both have good evidence to support each other. Films are rarely so sly, yet methodical, in approach, and DOUBT will unconditionally leave viewers talking about its debate-fuelling story weeks after seeing it. The most masterfully executed films, after all, are the ones that stay with us. Shanley’s film will not be leaving me anytime soon. |
||
|
||