What is Doubt about? Fundamentally, it’s not about anything particularly Catholic, or any mundane detail of the mortal world for that matter. That would be the “parable” side of the play’s original title, Doubt: A Parable. Both the play and the movie are about a much more universal dilemma that plagues any system of beliefs: that certainty, or “faith,” is an emotion — a particularly strong one at that — that fundamentally concerns itself with factual matters. Rather than be a roadblock to certainty, doubt is actually what provides faith’s engine. A stronger, absolute conviction better allows you to avoid the pain of uncertainty, which, on a mortal level, is the pain of being alive.
That struggle is tested is tested in a variety of ways by every character in Doubt (except for the gloriously ignorant children) as the possibility of a priest molestation case is raised. There’s no evidence for or against it, but the faith behind either point of view is absolute, irrefutable, and entirely a product of the circumstances. The fact that John Patrick Shanley could reduce that crisis of faith to characters — without making those characters archetypes — is what makes Doubt one of this generation’s greatest dramas. With everyone in both the theater and cinematic world worried about adapting the play to film, we should thank our lucky stars that, no matter what problems in adaptation take place, that core struggle is not lost in translation.
One of the inevitabilities of adapting the play to film is that the specific setting of Doubt, the “parable” side of the story, will inevitably grow more dominant. That same problem turned the adaptation of Wit, another intellectually astute Pulitzer Prize-winning play, into a film that would better be named Cancer. Here, John Patrick Shanley, who directs his own screenplay adaptation, turns Doubt into something of a post-Vatican II period piece. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is a hard-ass stereotypical Catholic school principal nun, and Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the hotshot, progressive young priest who smokes, takes three lumps of sugar with his tea, and most egregiously, writes with a ballpoint pen. To a modern day audience, the general politics will immediately endear the audience to Father Flynn.
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Article comments
1 - zoran vaskic
It's interesting. I've read some reveiws on the movie.I don't know if Father Flynn was guilty or not.It appears the story is so designed to not really allow you to have any true hint in anything played out in the movie tp indicate that this is actually so. In this sense, it is frustrating. You are left, based on the story line and the play out of the whole movie, to never have any real evidence to conclusively say he is or isn't.I'm not sure this is fair. What am I saying? Well, in real life, whether we see the answers or not, there is always a definte truth at the bottom of everything. In real life, a person in Father Flynn's position is either guilty or not guilty. He has either committed an indecency or he hasn't. One can make the point in a movie such as this that things are not always clear. The lack of clarity is in the eyes of the beholder, but it is not in the actual facts of what has or has not happened. I believe one can make the point of human uncertainty about truth in any situation and yet still allow you to know what that truth is. In this movie and it's central question, you are simply not allowed to know.
I think this is a mistake or flaw in terms of the story line. We need to know what the truth is. We can be instructed about human doubt at the same time as we are told what the truth of the situation really is. In order to make the point the about doubt we do not need to be kept in the dark about what did or did not happen between Father Flynn and the young student.
However having said all that, I thing Meryl Streep's performance is far stronger than Hoffman's along this line. She is more of a real person than some movie reviews I have read credit her with being.They say she is iron fisted and in a struggle for power with Hoffman as Father Flynn in this movie. Yes she blurts out her doubt at the end of the movie, but she reveals human tenderness throughout the movie. At first she appears to be strictly a Hitler, but then as the movie unfolds, she reveals herself to be a real person whose tenderness and humanity ooze out very perceptibly. The older blind nun is helped by her to find a fork at the table. This because the nun does not want the fact this nun is going blind to be revealed or else it will mean her departure from the institution. When the Viola Davis says she doesn't care if this Father is doing something inappropriate with her son, the nun asks, What kind of mother are you? Meaning she has some care in her soul not immediately apparent at the onset of the movie. She reveals to the young teacher at one point that she was married and had a husband who was killed in the war. This woman has lived outside a convent therefore, she has known real life and not just a closeted life in a convent. She says to the young teacher at one point that "she knows people" when asked how she knows this man may be molesting the young black student. What she is speaking about is the drawing on years of experience in living to allow one to come to certainty about something that is not readily apparent. This is a powerful truth that is completely valid in this or any other situation of life. There are some things we do know because of experience thru the years. Therefore when we see something that is not completely apparent or clear, we recognize the similarity from our experience. Yes we can be mistaken. But Streep's performance is more convincing than Hoffman's to suggest that he is indeed guilty. Whether this was intentionally played this way by the director of the movie or not not clear. it is either that, or it is simply that Streep's acting is such that it lends to that conclusion. I think some of the reviews of Streep's character are rather shallow. One thing is clear: she genuinely cares about the boy, about the possibility of wrong having been committed. It is not clear whether Hoffman's character truly does. There is not doubt about Streep's character and what she stands for; there is plenty of doubt about Hoffman's character and what he actually stands for. Based on that, he appears guilty to me. Again, it is rather unfair for the movie line, apart from the acting, to leave you hanging. I personally don't like it. Streep's performance convinces me Hoffman is guilty. The story line does not.