Doubt

In adapting a play for the big screen, the expansive strengths and abilities afforded by filmmaking must be considered. Bringing a camera into the narrative fold introduces an additional layer of perspective that will guide the audience through the corridors of the story. Suddenly, the storyteller has the ability to show the audience exactly what they want them to see (and nothing more). The camera becomes a window into a particular world and that window can provide an omniscient quality that the open stage is unable to conjure. But in bringing a story from the stage to the screen, there is the danger of that omniscience growing overbearing and that window merely revealing the obvious, a problem that is evident in John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own play Doubt.

Shanley's movie begins with a great amount of promise, introducing us to the key players of the tale: Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who both work at the same Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964. Father Flynn is meant to represent a new direction for the Catholic church, a modernization of old values, while Sister Aloysius represents the polar opposite. She has no interest in changing the ways of the church and she makes her stubbornness clear by ruling with an iron fist. The early scenes of the movie are very entertaining and Steep's rigid performance is quite frightening at first. She walks through a morning mass like a terrifying force of nature, slapping chatty children and barking at sleeping ones.

Shanley keeps the movie contained within the confines of the church, only occasionally offering a glimpse of the outside world. When the camera does venture outside the walls of the church, it never wanders beyond the boundaries of the surrounding neighbourhood. This restricted geography allows us to inhabit the church in the same way that Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius do and so we are drawn into their world in an intimate manner. But while Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius share a strong dedication to their faith, it becomes increasingly clear that they live on opposite sides of the fence. Whereas the priest has a loving, friendly relationship with the boys of the school, Sister Aloysius always keeps her distance, making sure to never grow emotionally attached to anyone.

Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn certainly do not see eye to eye, so when a young nun named Sister James (Amy Adams, seemingly trapped in the 'naive woman' role) approaches Sister Aloysius with concerns regarding the relationship between Father Flynn and an altar boy, Sister Aloysius pounces on the opportunity to discredit the priest that she so vehemently opposes. Sister James has no proof of anything, but the bits and pieces of potential evidence (such as Father Flynn inviting the boy into his office and the boy later returning to class looking uncomfortable, with the smell of alcohol on his breath) are enough for Sister Aloysius to begin her witch-hunt.

This sets up a potentially explosive battle between two great actors, but it is at this point that the movie begins to fall apart. Now that the story has entered its crucial second act, Shanley resorts to ludicrously transparent ways of fabricating tension. On the stage, this tension may have worked because the actors are freed of the constraints of the camera. But in the movie version of this story, Shanley twists the camera into crooked angles to remind the audience that something is askew. Suddenly, the movie is more laughable than powerful, because the camera sees this ambiguous conflict in black and white.

Shanley even goes overboard with symbolism, using tumultuous weather as a sign of an unhappy God looking down on the people embroiled in this conflict. Whenever a character does something questionable or seems to question their own actions, the wind picks up, the leaves begin to fly, and a storm rolls in. None of these directorial decisions are convincing or interesting, as they merely illustrate Shanley's lack of narrative imagination.

Part of the problem with Shanley's movie is that it begins to feel more like a series of ideas surrounding faith and the church, rather than a story with an engaging plot. As the movie approaches its conclusion, it loses focus and begins to meander down several paths. Shanley seems most interested in playing with the ideas of a pedophile priest and an angry nun, but his script never allows the characters to transcend the stereotypes. Hoffman is very good in the role, despite the shortcomings of his character on the page, but Streep's performance dissolves into a flat caricature by the end of the movie. She is no longer scary, but rather silly. Once the initial shock of her presence wears off, the character crumbles, revealing a dull collection of ideas and emotions cobbled together.

The point of Shanley's tale seems to be that all people in the Catholic church, from the old to the new, experience doubts in their lives. But this never feels like the sort of grand revelation it is meant to be, because everything is tied to loose ideas, instead of to the characters. Watching the movie, I felt as though I was seeing Shanley wrestling with his own demons, as opposed to Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius learning something about themselves. And because Shanley's approach to the subject matter is revealed to be so one-dimensional, the initial charm of this tightly-knit world eventually wears off. In movie form, Shanley's Doubt is unnecessarily obvious in its attempt to shine light on the challenges of faith. The camera may open the doors to new narrative possibilities, but in this case, its perspective is lazily uninspired.