CityLife

Doubt

JOHN Patrick Shanley’s play, brought to the screen by the author, is set in 1964, in a Catholic community in the Bronx.

This setting is crucial to the proceedings – after the assassination of Kennedy, in the aftermath of the reforming Vatican II and with the war in Vietnam beginning to take its toll, doubt was coming into the church and the US.

Even nuns were beginning to think that perhaps priests might be fallible and certainly didn’t need to be waited upon hand and foot.

But the forbidding Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), a long way from Mamma Mia!), Principal of St. Nicholas School, is certain of many things, and not least that the use of biros instead of fountain pens is akin to the devil’s work.

Reforming priest

She doesn’t much like charismatic, reforming priest Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but that doesn’t really matter to her in the great and immutable scheme of things.

And when Sister James (Amy Adams), a sweet and innocent young nun, confides to her she is uneasy about the amount of attention that Father Flynn is expending on the school’s first black student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), without a shred of evidence Sister Aloysius goes into battle with the priest.

Doubt is a film that compels its audience to think, to question everything they see and hear, and that leaves them with no clear answers to the many questions it raises.

So it will doubtless leave them divided and, if they’re expecting a trite Hollywood ending, perhaps even feeling confused and angry.

Is that necessarily such a bad thing?

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