Clerical Errors

Meryl Streep sinks her teeth into a godly role, but Doubt lacks bite.

by Sam Adams

STREEP VS. HOFFMAN: Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) accuses Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of molesting an altar boy in Doubt.

Late middle age is not kind to Hollywood actresses, but it has been a boon to Meryl Streep. Released from the burden of leading roles, she has been reborn as the character actress she was always meant to be. The part of Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the imperious antagonist of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, is a juicy morsel, and Streep flies at it with fangs bared, tearing every tender scrap from the bone.

Shanley's story, adapted from his much-hosannaed play, is set in 1964, amid Vatican II's modernizing dicta and a year after the assassination of the nation's first Catholic president, all of which gives fuel to the sister's ingrained sense of persecution. The old ways, the proper ways, are under siege, not least by Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the avuncular new arrival who believes St. Nicholas has an obligation to change with the times.

A warm, permissive type who tells his congregation not to fear the gray areas on the edges of theological certitude, Father Flynn clashes with Sister Aloysius over matters large and small. He sees adding a few secular songs to the Christmas concert as a welcoming gesture; she views "Frosty the Snowman" as pagan idolatry. There's an element of schoolboy's revenge to the way Shanley caricatures his straitlaced nun, her black cloak and hooded bonnet giving her the look of a bird of prey. But he is also carefully attuned to the nuances of the ritualistic power struggle between his principals, especially the way that, for all his reformist rhetoric, Father Flynn is not above using patriarchal privilege to quash his opponent. When he walks into Sister Aloysius' office and casually deposits himself behind her desk, Shanley makes sure that we absorb the weight of his casual presumption.

Having established the parameters of his ecclesiastical conflict — most sharply in a sequence that cross-cuts a cheerless dinner in the nuns' cloister and a roaring repast at Father Flynn's — Shanley proceeds to eat away at them. When Sister Aloysius first raises the prospect that Father Flynn may have interfered with one of his altar boys (although even so circumspect a phrase as that is never spoken), it seems like pure gamesmanship. She works her will on Sister James (Amy Adams), the boy's timorous and unformed history teacher, molding her vague suspicions into pointed accusations with the skills of a ruthless prosecutor. Although there is little in the way of hard evidence, Sister Aloysius' conviction is unwavering. She knows, and that is all she needs.

For a while, Shanley indulges Father Flynn's righteous indignation, but then he begins to entertain the notion that Sister Aloysius might be onto something. Perhaps the Father's loose-limbed approach to church doctrine is just a convenient cover for his own moral laxity, and perhaps the shrill and unyielding sister has been right all along. The trouble is that by the time Shanley starts to muddy the waters, the characters are so firmly established that the reversal never quite takes. It's as if The Crucible wanted us to consider the possibility that John Proctor might be a witch after all. Streep seems reluctant to relinquish her pitchfork, and Hoffman never locates the potential scoundrel beneath his robes.

Shanley tries to give the movie a sense of imbalance in the most literal-minded way imaginable, by tricking out the frames with titled angles that only call attention to its stagebound origins. But for one scene, the sole exchange between Sister Aloysius and the boy's mother, played with sorrowful gravity by Viola Davis, Doubt is as murky and provocative as it ought to be. The mother's unexpected response to Sister Aloysius' accusations turns the movie's easy equivalencies on its head, and opens up questions that are promptly discarded once Davis leaves the screen. The moral weight of Davis' performance makes the rest of the movie's exchanges seem like mere scheming: an enjoyable spectator sport, but nothing to make you question your faith.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Doubt | Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley | A Miramax release