Doubt

While this might have worked as a four-hander declaimed from the stage, as a film it once again underscores the difference (not to say superiority) between cinema and theater. John Patrick Shanley adapts and directs his own Pulitzer-winning play. He does some location shooting at the Bronx parochial school he actually attended in the early 60s, when the story is set, and populates it with additional characters, but the play is dissipated rather than opened-out, and askew camera angles and other stage business highlight the artificiality. What remains are the central performances, and they are quite good. Meryl Streep offers a sly caricature of the rigid old-school nun (she must have had fun doing this back-to-back with her loosey-goosey, aging hippie in Mamma Mia!), and Philip Seymour Hoffman as usual convinces as a Vatican II-era priest who may or may not be a pediphile. Amy Adams radiates innocence as the younger Sister of Charity enlisted in the older nun’s plot to force out the pastor, and Viola Davis is effective in a brief but crucial appearance as the mother of the boy who might have been abused. But in the effort to be open-ended, and provocative of walking-out-of-the-theater disputation, the film fails to find its focus or point. Having just worked with a friend on the story of his parochial school education, I found much of this film intriguing and even funny, but was finally annoyed by its refusal to resolve its themes, its attempt to have it every which way, under cover of its title. (2008, dvd, n.) *6* (MC-68.)