"Doubt" is a film with many fine elements, but its director, John Patrick Shanley, doesn't seem to trust them. Which is rather odd, because it was Shanley who wrote both the script and the play on which it's based.
That play, gripping enough to win four Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize and attract film stars such as Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, is set in the pivotal year of 1964 in St. Nicholas, a Catholic church and school in the Bronx.
It details a conflict between the church's Father Flynn (Hoffman) and the school's principal, Sister Aloysius (Streep), about the direction of the Catholic faith in general and the fate of one 12-year-old altar boy in particular.
Shanley the writer has carefully constructed this drama like the delicately balanced house of cards it is. On the stage as well as on the screen, "Doubt" is a highly polished piece of business, with every speech and every action calculated for maximum effect, a well-made play if ever there was one.
Although a did-he-or-didn't-he mystery is "Doubt's" central plot mechanism, the play and the film are about a whole lot more. Philosophical questions about conservative versus progressive religious values, about rigidity versus openness and suspicion versus proof, about how far it's appropriate to go when you are sure you are right, are what got Shanley to write the piece in the first place.
But in the process of opening this story up, of changing it from a four-actor stage play to a film with multiple characters and numerous extras, Shanley seems to have lost a certain amount of faith in what he'd written. As a director he's ended up pushing the drama harder than he needs to. He hasn't done anything fatal, but he has tampered with and hampered it.
For one thing, Shanley has chosen to bring too much of the outside world into St. Nicholas' cloistered halls. Having a cat physically catch a mouse at a key juncture is too literal a metaphor by half, and "Doubt" threatens to become meteorologically overwrought by putting all kinds of wind, rain and even thunder into the story whenever it feels the proceedings won't work on their own.
The only place where this kind of literalism works is "Doubt's" setting. Cinematographer Roger Deakins, production designer David Gropman and costume designer Ann Roth have combined to carefully re-create the look of the Bronx and the bonnet-wearing Sisters of Charity who call the borough home. An image of the nightgowned nuns coming out of their rooms en masse in the early morning is especially fine.
