(2) Doubt

Directed by John Patrick Shanley
Rated PG-13
2008
104 minutes

*** 1/2

John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, about a nun at a Catholic school in 1960s Brooklyn who believes (without any proof) that her head priest may have molested a 12 year old boy, is a film that didn't need to be made. It was extremely popular on Broadway, winning several Tonys, and certainly doesn't have much to it to suggest it needed to be made into a film. Alas, it was, and I must say for the most part, it was a good idea. The cast is uniformly good, with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams all turning in performances that will almost certainly land them Oscar nominations. However, the best performance in the film comes from Viola Davis as the mother of the possibly molested boy. Despite appearing in the film for no more than 15 minutes, every second she was on screen I found it impossible to tear my eyes away. Through her performance, I learned more about this mother than I did in 104 minutes of Meryl Streep's nasty, unforgiving Sister Aloysius. I've always been someone who disliked giving an Oscar to someone who really only appears in one scene, i'm willing to make an exception here. As you would expect from a Tony winning play, the writing is fantastic. I haven't seen the play, so I can't tell how much is different, but the majority of the film feels like it could play on a stage, so it must be pretty close. John Patrick Shanley really is a fantastic playwright, and I hope to see more films written by him in the future. His direction, however, is another story. In the hands of someone more accomplished, I feel this could have been one of the best films of the year. However, Shanley always seems concerned that not enough is going on, so he gives us these weird, Hal Hartley-esque tilted shots every few minutes that just disrupt the flow of the story. He also enjoyed tossing in acts of God after important speeches a bit too much (i.e. a character says something "wrong" and a light goes out, a tree branch breaks, etc.). It seems he was to worried that his material wasn't enough for a film, which it was, and he ends up showing his hand as a first-time director. Doubt is one of those films you recommend more for its performances and writing than for the film itself. The story isn't particularly new or interesting, and you more or less know where its going the entire way. And though John Patrick Shanley's shaky (at best) directing skills often get in the way of the film, I can recommend it for the performances of the main cast alone.