Doubt

I saw this film last week but am reminded of it today as I've been reading an unpublished play with some (but by no means all) similar thematic concerns. But this was a fascinating film. I hadn't seen the Patrick Shanley play from which it was adapted but it was obvious that Doubt had its genesis in the theatre, with its limited use of location and rich, heightened dialogue throughout. The central characters were Father Flynn, a nearly post-vatican II, awfully friendly type of younger priest who wants the schoolboys for whom he has some responsibilities as they attend the local grade school. The parish is American mostly Irish Catholic, still reeling from the assassination of JFK the previous year (it's 1964).

In opposition to Flynn's liberal but arguably over-chummy character is the rigid Sr Aloysius, head of the grade school and representative of the old, strict ways: of forming through severity and terror, though having the best interests of her charges at heart. She is alerted by a younger nun to behaviour on the part of Fr Flynn which is dubious at best but which she interprets as abuse of the worst kind, and verbal and tactical war is declared. The truth of the matter is left rather ambiguous, though Flynn does move on and there is at least the strong suspicion that his character has past form. But the ambiguity is an important part of the film's power: as viewer you must examine your own responses to the situation and observe what you yourself want to believe or assume to be true. Far more subtle than a lot of stories and 'misery lit's on the subject recently; though this is not to let the offending men and the institution they work for off the hook in any way.

The resonances of the play are stronger than that of a clash of characters or of a bad priest routed; the two figures stand for the old and the new ways of the Catholic church and on a wider level still, of society as a whole. I've seen some objections to the film on the grounds that Sr Aloysius, as a committed religious, would never take such an aggressive stand against her parish priest, but this isn't entirely the point. As the original play has for its subtitle, this play is a 'parable', and the dialogue, and most particularly the actors playing the lead parts (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep indeed) give convincing authenticity to the characters, they don't seem to be merely ciphers when watching the film. Who knows what strengths and lengths such religious women didn't reach for when protecting the young and otherwise vulnerable in their charge.

If Sr Aloysius was preternaturally convinced about the culpability of the young parish priest, her breakdown at the close of the film takes the form of her sobbing out loud of her doubts: her doubts of faith, I presumed; all of her pent-up past forcing itself into desperate articulacy. Well then, perhaps she is more modern than her stiff-bonneted presence initially indicates. Not that plenty of saints in the past didn't have doubts and trials of faith of course, but Streep's presentation of the crippling pain of these doubts, verging just on the edge of the 'staged', indicated something terrible. The real state of her soul all along - or the spiritual price she was willing to pay for her moral imperative. Either way - quite something that such a film should quite rightly get such generally powerful reviews all round. And also saying something that I'm still thinking of it a week on.

Actually I saw Meryl Streep in a brief interview on TV this morning, so am doubly impressed by her - both for her mordant wit coupled with an innate glamour when merely being herself, and for being able to bring a character like Sr Aloysius to life on the big screen. Keatsian negative capability for Hollywood stars - being so capable of remaining in such 'uncertainties, mysteries, doubts'...