John Patrick Shanley (2008)
In 1987 John Patrick Shanley wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck. His 2004 stage play Doubt won the Pulitzer Prize. The two works cover the same territory to the extent that they’re set in New York and the characters are Catholics; otherwise it’s hard to believe – on the basis of the screen adaptation of Doubt – that they’re by the same author. It’s unfortunate that, while Moonstruck is one of the best romantic comedies ever made in Hollywood, Doubt’s comic moments are mostly unintentional. Hearing Shanley talk in a radio interview about his adaptation of the play for the screen, you’re struck by a lack of sensitivity to the finer points of difference between the two media. Shanley mentioned his despair at the first draft of his adaptation before he hit on an image of feathers from a pillow spilling out – ‘I thought, well, that’s cinematic’. He explained that the play’s cast comprised many fewer characters than we see in the film – and none of the children in the Catholic secondary school in the Bronx where the action is based (the play appears to have been a four-hander). Shanley says that having the children actually part of the drama ‘certainly made a difference to the [adult] actors’. It’s not obvious that a major (understandable) change like this might have made a difference to the writing too.
In the opening scenes, Shanley’s translation of the material for the screen is risibly perfunctory and careless. The modernising priest Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon to a packed church congregation, including children from the school and the nuns who teach them. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the school’s dragon principal and Flynn’s ultra-conservative nemesis, stalks the pews hissing at dormant kids to wake up and giving the worst offenders a clip round the earhole. Not in a school assembly but in a public church service – with some of the children’s parents present. There are feebly obvious juxtapositions of the bon vivant Father Flynn dining merrily with the local bishop and monsignor and the nuns nibbling timidly, under the gimlet eye of Sister Aloysius, at their meagre supper.
The story is set in the autumn and early winter of 1964, which must have been one of the most bizarre seasons in American meteorological history. Its salient feature is a strong, symbolic wind – which Shanley uses to discomfit both the protagonists: it’s a wind of change that Sister Aloysius repeatedly tries to exclude by slamming down windows that she keeps finding unhelpfully wide open; it also seems to function as the ill wind that she herself is blowing in Father Flynn’s direction. As for the rain … The confrontation between Sister Aloysius and Mrs Miller (Viola Davis), the mother of the boy whom the principal is accusing Father Flynn of having seduced, is set up as one of the dramatic high points of the story. Shanley takes it outside and, although it’s dry, both women are armed with umbrellas that look like weaponry, as if the actresses had said to each other, ‘We’re bound to need these in this film’. Meryl Streep’s forethought is spectacularly vindicated as she makes her way back to the school in a momentary hurricane. It’s a relief that – apart from the meteorology and the regulation, counterproductive ‘opening out’ of the material, which come together in the Sister Aloysius-Mrs Miller exchange – Shanley seems to give up pretty soon on his attempts to make the film ‘filmic’. He may have Roger Deakins as his cinematographer but Shanley himself seems to have little talent for doing much more than record the performances. (As far as I can see, this is only the second cinema feature he’s directed – and the first since Joe and the Volcano in 1990.) Once Doubt stops trying to pretend to be other than a stage play, the action – which at the start is slack as well as shallow – at least gets to be reasonably claustrophobic.
The child abuse scandals within the American Catholic church provide a theme that is both historical and, because of their notorious concealment over a period of many years, topical. But Doubt is not dramatically complex; the confrontation between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius depends for depth and tension largely on an audience thinking, ‘Well, he looks a nice enough chap and she seems a bigoted old bitch but there was a lot of it about and they hushed it up so you never know … ‘. Of the three principals, Sister Aloysius gets the worst deal from Shanley. The naïve young Sister James (Amy Adams), to whose real-life prototype the film is dedicated, is the vehicle for dramatising a crisis of conscience as to what doing the right thing amounts to, for a professionally religious person in this situation, and learns something about duplicity from the experience. Father Flynn incarnates the did-he-didn’t-he uncertainty of the piece and Shanley gives Philip Seymour Hoffman scope for suggesting a difference between what we see of Flynn and what’s going on inside his head.
There’s no contrast between Sister Aloysius’s behaviour and her soul (until her last-minute revelation – a phony theatrical flourish). Shanley drops in a couple of biographical details – she was once married but her husband was killed in the war – as if the very fact of widowhood proves she’s really a decent, loving person. The lack of subtlety in the writing and direction of this character is epitomised by a scene that takes place as Sister Aloysius’s implacable campaign to have Father Flynn removed from his job is getting underway. As she and Sister James are about to talk, one of the school’s lay employees comes in with a cat, explaining that there’s a mouse about. At the end of the conversation, the woman returns with cat and dead mouse. We get the point: Sister Aloysius is going to be voraciously efficient in her pursuit of the priest who may be vermin and is certainly her prey. In case we don’t get the point, however, the woman – brandishing the mouse corpse – says: ‘You need a cat to catch a mouse’. In case we still don’t get the point, Sister Aloysius replies significantly, ‘Yes, you do’. And in case even that’s not enough, she mutters, ‘Yes, you do’, again after the woman has gone.
This all makes Doubt sound ridiculous and in many ways it is: as a piece of filmmaking, it’s really primitive. But the writing – as superficial dialectic for the theatre – is assured and, in its limited way, clever. As the two main characters become more emotionally exposed, Shanley sustains the mystery of whether Father Flynn has or hasn’t abused the altar boy Donald Miller (the school’s first black pupil). Yet Doubt is all about the performances – even though the odds are stacked against the actors. The characters are designed to represent points of view (Shanley makes little attempt to disguise the fact that, as characters, they’re subordinate to the issues of the piece) – and because the issues are ‘important’, the actors can’t ignore them. But an audience can’t ignore the actors either – not these actors anyway. Because Shanley hasn’t fused the issues and the means of expressing them in a satisfactory way, they have a mechanical quality; and the substance of the performers overpowers the thin material they have to work with. The performances are gripping but they’re not fully satisfying – you’re conscious that it’s the rhythm and impetus of essentially theatrical performance that is compelling your attention and that that’s not enough in a screen drama. It’s a strange phenomenon: when the actors are flying here, gripping really is the word. You experience the effect of the acting almost physically; at the same time, you’re aware that it’s performance in an almost abstract sense, rather than performance integrated with – and inconspicuous within – credible characterisation.
This is especially true of Meryl Streep, partly because of the way Sister Aloysius is conceived but largely because of the kind of actress she is. I can’t think of any other actor who so often imposes themselves so immediately in the way that Streep does. It happens again here; in our first sight of Sister Aloysius, a backview of her shoulders and head, sitting at the back of the church, Streep cranes her neck to see what’s going on in the pews ahead – the almost violent force of her curiosity has terrific impact. (The effect is ruined, of course, by Shanley’s then sending her on her ludicrous tour of the congregation, dispensing castigation.) Other aspects of what Streep does are familiar in less satisfying ways. There’s a lot of gestural detail and facial idiosyncrasy in her portrait of Sister Aloysius but, since these surface elaborations don’t seem fully absorbed, the effect is fussy. There are moments when the performance looks overworked, others when Streep seems still to be working it out – trying this, trying that. Streep is a great actress but she would have been (might still be) an even greater one if directors were harder on her. Shanley isn’t the first who seems so grateful to have her in his film that he leaves her to her own technically lavish devices.
Streep has found, for Sister Aloysius, another remarkable voice – a harsh twang that sounds to come from deep inside – and her ability to use a particular part of her body as a way into character is undiminished. This time it’s the hands and the effect is amazing: you’re aware of Meryl Streep’s hands in a way you’ve never been before and they’re highly expressive – powerful, thick-wristed, insensitive. The implacably disapproving Sister Aloysius looks not so much as if she has a nasty smell under her nose as that she’s savouring a nasty taste in her mouth; this too is an impressive detail. But the hands, the voice, the physiognomic tics and twists don’t quite come together as the characteristics of the same person. Streep suggests a working woman who is brutally plain speaking; her terse wit is sometimes very funny but she could have used a bit more humour – to make you see that Sister Aloysius can be charming almost in spite of herself (and thus has the means to draw in an interlocutor, who then finds that she or he is ambushed). Many of Streep’s readings are so raspy and vengeful that it’s hard to believe that anyone would say anything more than is strictly necessary to Sister Aloysius. And Shanley seems be unaware that her appearance intensifies the forbidding aspect to a degree that verges on the farcical: the steel-rimmed spectacles; the sharpness of Streep’s profile, emphasised by the oddly-shaped, poke bonnet-like headgear of this order of nuns. (There are moments when Streep suggests a malign Jemima Puddleduck.) Yet in spite of all this, Meryl Streep’s histrionic power is the strongest feature of Doubt; and when she finds a vein, as she does at points during her big exchanges with Philip Seymour Hoffman, it is thrilling – and, while it’s happening, absolutely believable.
Most of what Hoffman does as Father Flynn is masterly. The way that he sustains the character’s ambiguity could hardly be bettered – Hoffman actually succeeds (a tremendous feat in the circumstances) in getting you interested in the man rather than in discovering the truth of his motives. I wondered occasionally in the first half of the film if Father Flynn needed a bit more flamboyance so that we got a sense that Sister Aloysius was irked by that, as well as by the priest’s modern theology; but Hoffman’s decision to ration the charm – to Flynn’s sermons, especially when he puts on an Irish accent; to chortling at his jokes at dinner with the senior churchmen (who negotiate a promotion for Flynn when he leaves the parish of St Nicholas) – pays dividends. Making Flynn personally unprepossessing increases Hoffman’s opportunities to show us more of the priest’s divided feelings; you can believe that in life this man can get by without people giving him a second, harder look. The only possible flaw in Hoffman’s performance is that there are moments in the set pieces with Streep when he gives the impression that he doesn’t really believe what he’s doing. He can hardly be blamed for that.
For all that the four main parts are played by very different types of actor the performances have one thing in common. They assure you that the actors are greatly talented rather than make you believe in the characters they’re interpreting. The conception of the idealistic, conscience-stricken Sister James is dreary but Amy Adams impresses you both with the commitment with which she plays the part and, even though it’s so early in her screen career, with the versatility she’s already shown. It needs an actress of genuine charm and individuality to prevent Sister James becoming, pretty quickly, a pain; Adams manages this with something to spare. I’d not seen Viola Davis before; she gives the character of Mrs Miller a physical and emotional authority that’s very striking in the way it allows the woman to dominate her exchanges with Sister Aloysius (this is one of the few genuine surprises of the film), even though these are poorly staged. The two communities of the story – the nuns and the schoolchildren – don’t generate much interest. Shanley seems to underline rather too heavily the idea that nuns were a dying breed by the 1960s: Streep and Adams are just about the only two non-geriatrics on the staff – and the blind, the halt and the lame are well represented. Apart from Joseph Foster, who has a worrying, impacted neediness as Donald Miller, the kids aren’t expressive. They’ve been directed to telegraph their salient characteristic (and it is usually just the one).
10 February 2009