Courtesy of Miramax Films

A Wimple Plan | Meryl Streep has a scheme to bring down a seemingly untrustworthy priest in Doubt.

Doubt

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DOUBT
Directed by John Patrick Shanley. Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams. Opens Thu, Dec 25.
****

My favourite moment in Doubt is entirely wordless. The nuns at a Catholic primary school in 1964 are eating dinner, with the terrifying, imperious Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the school principal, presiding at the head of the table. Even during a communal ritual like this one, the room is agonizingly silent save for the scrape of knives against the plates. The youngest woman in the room, by quite a wide margin, is the chipmunk-cheeked Sister James (Amy Adams), who extracts a piece of gristle from her mouth and puts it on her plate ... whereupon she notices Sister Aloysius quietly regarding her, disapproval radiating from behind her rimless spectacles. That’s all it takes for poor Sister James to cave in: without a single word being spoken, she grimly takes the inedible clump of fat from her plate, puts it back in her mouth, and begins chewing again.

Doubt is at its best in these small displays of Sister Aloysius’ power, over lapses that only seem trivial to everyone else: she disapproves of everything from ballpoint pens to taking sugar with your tea to the singing of “Frosty the Snowman” at Christmastime. She’s one “mean old clam,” to use Tina Fey’s expression, and she especially disapproves of Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who makes the heretical suggestion that nuns and priests should try and behave a little more like human beings toward their students and the members of the congregation. Flynn has befriended Donald, the school’s only black student, and when Sister Aloysius hears about a mysterious, apparently emotional encounter between Flynn and Donald, she requires no prompting to conclude that Flynn is guilty of some form of sexual impropriety.

But it’s impossible to know for sure what actually happened: Flynn offers a perfectly innocent explanation for what happened, but it doesn’t quite account for his or Donald’s odd behaviour later that day. Plus, as Flynn himself says in the sermon that opens the movie — a speech which dutifully sets out writer/director John Patrick Shanley’s Big Theme — doubt is a constant in all of our lives, and indeed may be one of the only things that holds us together. I’m not convinced that Shanley’s script makes a very convincing argument for that proposition — surely the only reason we have doubt about what happened between Flynn and Donald is because he declines to show it to us — but it does a very clever job of toying with your perceptions of Flynn, who seems plausibly innocent, then guilty, then innocent again with practically every other scene.

As a director (this is the first time he’s stepped behind the camera since 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano), Shanley hammers home his points too loudly, whether he’s making an obvious contrast between the nuns at dinner and the priests rowdily joking and smoking as they dig into their blood-red slabs of beef, or shooting Streep from an ominous low angle, as if she were Vincent Price in The Witchfinder General. (He also gives Doubt the most portentously Gothic weather patterns since Wuthering Heights.)

But as a writer, Shanley (who was inspired by his own boyhood experiences in Catholic school) fills the film with telling social details that vividly recreate the mores of this bygone time — the awkward social dancing classes in the gymnasium, the way Flynn automatically takes Sister Aloysius’ seat behind her desk when he visits her in her office. I was reminded a little of Mad Men in the way Doubt shows how the early ’60s, which can seem like such a modern period, had social customs that can seem as peculiar and alien as an Edith Wharton novel.

That old world is the territory of Sister Aloysius — I’d call Meryl Streep’s performance “juicy,” except the character seems so pinched and dry. I’m not sure if Streep gives Sister Aloysius much inner life, but she definitely nails the externals — the darting, cunning eyes, the Bronx bray that she slips into on the rare occasions she becomes emotional. She’s a character to haunt any Catholic schoolboy’s nightmares, and of that I have not the slightest ounce of doubt.