'Doubt' director's skill deals with moral, theological issues
A prizewinning playwright packs weighty questions into a finely told tale
Thursday, December 25, 2008 SHAWN LEVY
The Oregonian Staff
The legal concept of reasonable doubt requires, more or less, that jurors considering the guilt of a defendant presume innocence unless faced with wholly persuasive evidence otherwise. Apply that same notion in the arena of religious morality, though, and it takes on strikingly different connotations. Religious doubt conflicts not with intellectual certainty but with faith, and the chief juror in religious matters isn't somebody chosen by 11 impaneled peers but God himself.
So what happens when somebody who is meant to be a vessel of God's word -- a priest, say -- is suspected of violating his position of trust and power, and the person who notices this potential misdeed -- a nun, say -- feels that her intuition of guilt trumps the need to prove wrongdoing?
Does a cunning nose for wrongdoing entitle an accuser to act as judge and jury? Is there a formula that permits the sheer gravity of an offense to outweigh the rights of the accused to the presumption of innocence? And how do these questions affect the godliness of those involved, a matter that daily haunts all of their words and deeds, let alone such morally freighted ones?
This is a lot to think about, but John Patrick Shanley managed to pack it all into his Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play, "Doubt," which he has now directed as a fine, profound and exquisitely acted film. It's a movie that alternates little moments of humanity with massive moral and theological questions and generally handles both with compelling skill and care.
Now and again Shanley flubs some of the directorial aspects of the picture -- if the script and actors are doing their jobs, we don't need him to tilt the camera to indicate inner turmoil -- but the writing is powerful, the acting is sure, and the feel for place and time is impeccable.
"Doubt" is set at St. Nicholas parish in 1964 in the Bronx. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a compelling sermonist fully immersed in the daily life of his congregation, particularly the schoolchildren, whom he coaches in basketball and in little lessons of life -- cleaning their fingernails, asking girls to dance and so on.
But his newfangled attitude (it is the era of Vatican II) doesn't sit well with Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), a hard-minded disciplinarian of the kind that terrified generations of young Catholics into walking the straight and narrow or fleeing it in a sweat.
Sister Aloysius thinks -- nay, she knows -- that Father Flynn is hiding something, and when a novice teacher, Sister James (Amy Adams), reports that one of her students returned from a meeting with the priest behaving strangely, she decides that Flynn has molested the boy and that she must unstick him from his post.
One of the brilliances of the script is that it doesn't tell us, not really, whether Sister Aloysius' assumptions are based in fact. There are perfectly plausible reasons to believe she's wrong -- some of them provided by the boy's mother (Viola Davis) in a stunning conversation with the nun. The film essentially puts us in the position of jurors; you will certainly leave the theater with talking points.
But save some talk to appreciate Shanley's affectionate portrait of Catholic life of decades past. And save some more for the acting: Streep with a bitter, feisty, knowing Bronx sneer; Hoffman boyish and quizzical and slow to react but not to catch on; Adams wide-eyed and attentive; Davis squirmy and, when pressed, devastatingly candid. It's a splendid ensemble, equal in almost every way to the fine, probing script.
(102 minutes, rated PG-13, area theaters) Grade: B+
'Doubt' director's skill deals with moral, theological issues - OregonLive.com
----
I recommend this movie to anyone here, since we all debate religion and theological concepts. I'm pretty sure nearly all members will enjoy this film.
A prizewinning playwright packs weighty questions into a finely told tale
Thursday, December 25, 2008 SHAWN LEVY
The Oregonian Staff
The legal concept of reasonable doubt requires, more or less, that jurors considering the guilt of a defendant presume innocence unless faced with wholly persuasive evidence otherwise. Apply that same notion in the arena of religious morality, though, and it takes on strikingly different connotations. Religious doubt conflicts not with intellectual certainty but with faith, and the chief juror in religious matters isn't somebody chosen by 11 impaneled peers but God himself.
So what happens when somebody who is meant to be a vessel of God's word -- a priest, say -- is suspected of violating his position of trust and power, and the person who notices this potential misdeed -- a nun, say -- feels that her intuition of guilt trumps the need to prove wrongdoing?
Does a cunning nose for wrongdoing entitle an accuser to act as judge and jury? Is there a formula that permits the sheer gravity of an offense to outweigh the rights of the accused to the presumption of innocence? And how do these questions affect the godliness of those involved, a matter that daily haunts all of their words and deeds, let alone such morally freighted ones?
This is a lot to think about, but John Patrick Shanley managed to pack it all into his Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play, "Doubt," which he has now directed as a fine, profound and exquisitely acted film. It's a movie that alternates little moments of humanity with massive moral and theological questions and generally handles both with compelling skill and care.
"Doubt" is set at St. Nicholas parish in 1964 in the Bronx. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a compelling sermonist fully immersed in the daily life of his congregation, particularly the schoolchildren, whom he coaches in basketball and in little lessons of life -- cleaning their fingernails, asking girls to dance and so on.
But his newfangled attitude (it is the era of Vatican II) doesn't sit well with Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), a hard-minded disciplinarian of the kind that terrified generations of young Catholics into walking the straight and narrow or fleeing it in a sweat.
Sister Aloysius thinks -- nay, she knows -- that Father Flynn is hiding something, and when a novice teacher, Sister James (Amy Adams), reports that one of her students returned from a meeting with the priest behaving strangely, she decides that Flynn has molested the boy and that she must unstick him from his post.
One of the brilliances of the script is that it doesn't tell us, not really, whether Sister Aloysius' assumptions are based in fact. There are perfectly plausible reasons to believe she's wrong -- some of them provided by the boy's mother (Viola Davis) in a stunning conversation with the nun. The film essentially puts us in the position of jurors; you will certainly leave the theater with talking points.
But save some talk to appreciate Shanley's affectionate portrait of Catholic life of decades past. And save some more for the acting: Streep with a bitter, feisty, knowing Bronx sneer; Hoffman boyish and quizzical and slow to react but not to catch on; Adams wide-eyed and attentive; Davis squirmy and, when pressed, devastatingly candid. It's a splendid ensemble, equal in almost every way to the fine, probing script.
(102 minutes, rated PG-13, area theaters) Grade: B+
'Doubt' director's skill deals with moral, theological issues - OregonLive.com
----
I recommend this movie to anyone here, since we all debate religion and theological concepts. I'm pretty sure nearly all members will enjoy this film.
