Doubting Subtlety in Doubt
John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his parabolic play is heavy-handed on symbolism.By Neda Toloui-Semnani
January 12, 2009
Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt. (allmoviephoto.com)Before its adaptation for the screen, the theatrical version of the movie Doubt was entitled Doubt: A Parable. As the title suggests, the play was an unabashed morality tale. Like others before it, this parable was a lesson in story form—a short, concise play about virtue, compassion, prejudice, and faith. When the playwright, screenwriter, and director John Patrick Shanley adapted the play for the screen, he dropped the second part of the title but none of its parabolic tendencies. Like the theatrical version, the film plays to the audience’s prejudices, but it is separated from the intimacy of the theater. The heady symbolism falls a bit short, feeling in some moments like a lecture rather than edgy, thought-provoking cinema.
This is partly because symbolism, like acting, must be bigger in the theater. With the giant screen and film techniques that force audience focus, subtlety becomes essential. Shanley’s tendency to welcome, even encourage the audiences’ personal biases is compelling, even deliciously dangerous. He uses the public’s bias against priests, born of abuse scandals that broke several years ago, to his benefit. The film is replete with commanding performances and sympathetic characters that guarantee some critical admiration, accolades, and award nominations. And the film deserves it. But the heavy-handed symbolism required of a parable stymies rather than serves the story’s emotional core.
The film opens on St. Nicholas Parish in the Bronx. The camera cuts to the alter wine and other accruements of the Catholic service to a soft, worried African-American boy, Donald Miller, the only African-American child in a predominately Irish and Italian parish. Miller, who is played with heartbreaking vulnerability by relative newcomer Joseph Foster II, opens the door and steps into the rectory. He is late, apologetic, nervous and concerned. Immediately, we know that Muller is stepping on to the screen as a sacrificial lamb.
Doubt is set in 1964, just before the close of the Second Vatican Council and the dawning of what is widely considered the softer, gentler Catholic Church. Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) delivers a homily at the film’s start that heralds the coming changes. From his pulpit, Father Flynn speaks passionately about the universal human experience and in so doing he puts forward an eloquent argument for tolerance and compassion. People, he insists, are connected through their experience of darkness and devastation, not through fierce, determined certainty. Struggle and doubt are not our jailors, he says, but indicators of our humanity.
As he speaks, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), St. Nicholas’ steely principal, seated with the congregation maintains order among the flock. As she walks among parishioners disciplining unruly children, she has one ear trained on Father Flynn’s sermon.
Doubt is as powerful and sustaining as certainty, he says. In response, Sister Beauvier’s thin lips come together in a hard, palpable expression of disapproval. Without knowing it, Father Flynn has thrown down the gauntlet and Sister Beauvier, certain in her righteousness, has picked it up to the battle for the future of the parish.
The ensuing war between Sister Beauvier and Father Flynn pivots on Miller’s wellbeing and his painful, turbulent family life. Both claim to be concerned for the child’s safety. We learn that Muller, a lonely, sensitive child, is isolated from his classmates, though his gentle nature provokes sympathy and protection among some in the class.
We are relieved when Father Flynn, who positions himself as Miller’s ally and protector, shows Miller kindness and encouragement. When the young, idealistic history teacher, Sister James (Amy Adams), reports Miller’s strange behavior after returning from a meeting with Father Flynn, Sister Beauvier finally has some small support for her suspicions. Father Flynn’s small kindnesses are thrown into question and accusations follow. Nearly immediately, Sister James regrets her suspicions. She cries that the suspicion has left her feeling further from God. Sister Beauvier snaps in reply, “In the pursuit of wrong doing, one steps away from God.” For the remainder of the film, an increasingly agitated Sister James cannot sleep. The film is never clear about Father Flynn’s guilt or innocence. But as questions and suspicions pile up, neither nun turns to Miller or any other student to investigate. The film trusts the audience to come to a conclusion on their own about Father Flynn.
But that trust has little room to breathe because of Shanley’s reliance on clichés. The same audience that is given the power to come to a decision about Father Flynn’s guilt is capable of understanding the cat-and-mouse relationship between Sister Beauvier and Father Flynn without a physical representation of the animals in the film. Additionally, the audience can grasp the concept of change without seeing the strong, unsettling wind blowing through the film, pushing the characters out of frames, injuring a blind nun, and leaving Father Flynn—the harbinger of change—nonplussed. Another director may not have leaned as heavily on symbols and clichés. Doubt purports to celebrate complexity and nuance, but through highlighting, underlining, and lingering over moments pregnant with meaning, it pummels the audience with symbols.
Doubt flits and flies landing briefly on issues of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation to stoke tension, but these issues are essentially red herrings. It is not a meditation of the one versus the other, good versus evil, feminine versus masculine, black versus white, faith versus non-faith, or even right versus wrong. Doubt is Shanley’s argument against absolutes. Through masterful performances given by Streep and Hoffman, the film argues compassion is arrived at through struggling and acknowledging uncertainty, or the murky middle. It is only through trudging through this grayness that God and man meet and accept faith sustained by doubt.
Neda Toloui-Semnani is a staff writer at Congressional Quarterly and a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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