Doubt, the Catholic moral drama starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is engaging for a while, but it ends up imploding. Streep plays a nun in 1964 who hates sugar, ballpoint pens and anything remotely approaching an enhancement of the lives of men. Her view is that suffering is the point of one’s existence, so when a liberal priest (Hoffman) comes to St. Nicholas—with the first Negro student enrolled at the school—she’s immediately on guard.
She’s like a one-woman Taliban, physically striking children in church and bearing false witness when it suits her—but she may be right in her unsubstantiated suspicion that Father Flynn (Hoffman) is molesting the Negro altar boy in private quarters. The doubt is seeded through an innocent vessel played by Amy Adams. With such an interesting conflict, Doubt ought to be excellent, but instead it dodges the question of what happened and, like an agnostic arguing with himself about faith and reason, is eventually more like a game than a drama about a devastating accusation with real consequences. Hoffman makes off with every scene, Adams is great and Streep overacts as always. Doubt does nail the disparity between the Catholic Church’s coddled priests and hardworking nuns.
I highly recommend Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code); also added my review of The Queen.
