Tough love

Doubt offers a complex look at faith and compassion | Rebecca Cusey

Miramax Films

Doubt, an excellent big-screen adaptation of a Broadway play by John Patrick Shanley, starts with three familiar figures: a kind Catholic priest, a harsh intolerant nun, and a trusting young nun. However, these characters are challenged and developed so richly that, by the end, the audience doubts its initial impressions. The priest's kindness may be merely a sinister front. The nun's inflexibility is revealed as, perhaps, compassion in action. And the young nun's trust is traded for something more complex: the beginnings of understanding of human nature.

The movie (rated PG-13 for "thematic material") opens in 1964 with a homily on doubt given by Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the genial pastor of the parish church and school. Wide-eyed Sister James (Amy Adams) sits in her pew while the older Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) glides down the aisle like an avenging raven, smacking talking children and hissing sleeping ones awake. As the school principal feared by the children, and many of the adults, Sister Aloysius is strict to the extreme, banning hair clips, secular Christmas songs, and ballpoint pens, which she sees as leading to the decline of penmanship. "Every easy choice today will have its consequence tomorrow," she says.