John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize winning drama ‘Doubt’, which he has now directed for the big screen, tells the story of a new liberal minded teacher who attempts to make some changes in an archly conservative school and comes in to face to face conflict with the school’s establishment. The time is 1964 and the setting is St Nicholas, a Catholic school in the Bronx. The two combatants are the charismatic priest Father Flynn, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Sister Aloysius Beauvier, played by Merryl Streep.
In Peter Weir’s ‘Dead Poets Society’ the school holds it against Robin William’s Mr Keating that he is responsible for the suicide of one of the school’s finest students because of his unusual teaching methods. In ‘Doubt’ the school believes Father Flynn has been sexually inappropriate towards the school’s first Afro American students, Donald Miller. In both films the school shows their radical new teacher the door!
‘Doubt’ is one of the finest dramas of 2008. It has been made in a very intriguing, provocative way. Quite deliberately, we are never quite sure where the truth lies. The two main characters make fascinating studies; Streep holding on with all her strength to her certainty, Hoffman desperate to keep his new position. The performances are exemplary.
There’s real electricity generated in ‘Doubt’. There’s a couple of scenes that will forever stay with me. There’s a scene that takes place in Sister Aloysius’s chambers. Sister Aloysius is tearing into Father Flynn. Father Flynn asks her, ‘don’t you have any compassion?’, Aloysius replies straight away, ‘no, not when it comes to you’.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman gets to deliver a stunning farewell speech with the theme being that there’s an unstoppable wind that pushes us through our lives that there’s no point fighting against.
Food for thought! Yes, it was that kind of a film!
