Directed by John Patrick Shanley.
Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams and Viola Davis.
SYNOPSIS:
The iron-gloved head Sister of a Catholic school clashes with a charismatic priest after she becomes suspicious about the nature of his relationship with a young student.
I missed Doubt when it was first released in 2009. It came out during the concentrated flurry of January / February Oscar hopefuls, flooding the multiplex screens with that Academy-specific style of acting intensity. The nagging sense of having ‘missed’ its first theatrical run oddly increased my expectations as “the one that got away”.
What intrigued me so much was that I knew hardly anything of Doubt beyond its dramatic trailer: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep in a religious school. This is essentially what the film details, but also approaches child molestation, homosexuality and Amy Adams.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a fine actor who can raise the calibre of any film. He gives Charlie Wilson’s War its one great scene. He dominates every frame he graces, even when he has to play the pathetic, quivering sort as in Happiness (another child molestation film).
In Doubt, Hoffman plays a very likeable priest who is also head of the Catholic school where the film is set. It begins with one of his Sunday sermons, a personal account of doubt in God and his beliefs. By showing such honesty so early on, and in front of a congregation so large, even the most anti-religious of us would find him difficult to dislike. By Hoffman having such a strict, mean antagonist in Meryl Streep only accentuates this.
Meryl Streep, another fine actor, is the head Sister at the school and commands a troupe of nuns with military sternness, amongst who is the incredibly sweet natured Amy Adams. Streep singles out children just to berate them, as an old, bitter woman would, desperate to spread her misery around. She is a cold, hard caricature of all those lonely, angry teachers we all knew at school. She would punish an un-tucked shirt as if it were attempted arson.
As a viewer, we’re used to this. Hoffman is our hero, everyman protagonist - warm and offering us his flaws - whereas Streep is the baddie, an obsessed hag with a vendetta. She begins to suspect Hoffman of something after his initial sermon, telling the other nuns to keep a close eye on him. What – she doesn’t say – but the very fact that he has ‘doubts’ is enough for her paranoia.
But then the film starts to play with our expectations of character convention. Streep will occasionally flash a moment of compassion – cutting up the dinner of a sister slowly losing her sight – while Hoffman will do something creepy, like explaining the importance of clean fingernails and how he likes to keep them a little long. This by itself is only odd, but when edited together with the expression on one boy’s face, the hygiene lesson is given a sinister subtext.
These subtle moments of doubt are framed jarringly by Roger Deakins’ cinematography. The film is mostly shot ordinarily, if not aesthetically as is Deakins’ manner. Yet every now and then there will be a Dutch angle to rival the most askew of noirs. A Dutch angle is where the camera is titled to its left or right, embedding an instant disjointedness in the frame. Its name is an ironic one, like Little John not being little at all. The Netherlands is really quite flat. These shots will interrupt a sequence suddenly, drawing one’s attention away from the drama and to the picture itself. Something doesn’t look right. Everything is on edge. Deakins captures the essence of doubt within a single shot.
Overall, Doubt is engaging, but a little overwrought. The film feels less than the sum of its parts, suffering from being too theatrical. Not in an overacting sense, but in that the entire thing reeks of adaptation. There’s nothing wrong with long scenes in small rooms, but if handled wrongly, as they occasionally are in Doubt (some of the framings are too expressionistic), you can tell they were originally crafted for the stage.
There is, however, a very memorable sermon in the film, one that captures the essence of doubt as much as Deakins’ Dutch angles. After the first accusation against Hoffman about his relationship with one of the young boys, he delivers a fiery story about the nature of gossip. It sums up how we, as viewers, can be influenced by the slightest movement on camera, which can infect our minds for the rest of the film.
A woman begins to gossip about a man, about some terrible things she has heard he might have done, but with no proof of such. Her tales are at best based on hearsay, at worst on lies. She confesses gossiping to her priest. Furious with her, he tells her to take a pillow and a knife, and climb to the roof of her building. “Stab the pillow,” he tells her, “stab it until all the feathers have been scattered across this city by the wind”. So she does. She takes a pillow, and a knife, and climbs to the top of her building. She stabs the pillow for every bad thing she has gossiped of, and, sobbing, watches as the wind scatters the feathers across the city. She returns to the Father, in shame, and asks him “What next?”
“Now,” he replies, “you must go and bring every single feather to me.”
“But Father,” she cries, “that’s impossible!”
Oli Davis
365 Days, 100 Films
Movie Review Archive
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