Unreasonable Doubt

John Patrick Shanley won a Pulitzer Prize for his play Doubt, which he has now brought to the screen as writer and director.

Shanley claims Doubt is a study in ambiguity. The year is 1964. A rigid nun (Meryl Streep) believes a charming priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is up to no good. She possesses total certainty, and she enlists a naïve younger nun (Amy Adams) in her crusade. The naïve nun doesn’t know what to think or whom to believe, and indeed there is no way anyone can know for sure. In the preface to the published script of the play, Shanley writes, “We’ve got to learn to live with a full measure of uncertainty. There is no last word.” He claims he has revealed the truth about the priest only to the actors who have played the part.

Doubt is a nearly perfect piece of theater. It has four characters, hurtles forward like a freight train over the course of an intermissionless 90 minutes, and leaves the audience devastated. The movie is longer and fussier, and features all manner of ludicrous flourishes, such as powerful breezes intended to represent the “winds of change” and skewed camera angles that are supposed to capture the off-kilter emotions of the protagonists but remind one of nothing so much as the scenes on the old Batman television show from the 1960s featuring the Joker and the Riddler.

Shanley is not a good director of his own work. His only previous directorial credit was on Joe versus the Volcano, an ambitious and clever screenplay he mangled into a cinematic stillbirth in 1991. This time, he was clearly so abashed to be working with Streep and Hoffman that he did nothing to rein them in. They both turn in the worst performances of their careers. Streep, in particular, is simply dreadful, mincing and pursing her lips and speaking in an indecipherable accent–in marked contrast to Cherry Jones, who essayed the role on Broadway in a titanic turn that will be remembered for decades.

It may seem odd that Shanley would prove so ham-fisted in translating his own work to the screen, especially considering his conviction that Doubt can only be understood by the most subtle of intelligences.

But Shanley’s certitude about the lack of certitude in his play demonstrates why it was a mistake to put him at the helm of the movie version, since it proves he is an even worse interpreter of his own work than he is a director of it. Such things do happen; it was precisely for this reason that D.H. Lawrence once advised readers to trust the tale, not the teller.

Doubt works not because the story is ambiguous, but because it is not ambiguous. It is, rather, a potent and unforgettable account of systemic injustice. Both movie and play have a hero and a villain. The villain appears to be the hero, and the hero appears to be the villain, and that is what makes Doubt initially compelling. When we discover that things are not what they first seem to be, we discover the true horror in the situation that confronts us. The hero is basically powerless. The villain is institutionally powerful. The question is not who did wrong but whether the wrongdoer can, in fact, be stopped when the hero has no means of doing so.

The only way to perceive the story of Doubt differently would require us to believe that an unspeakable act is actually a gesture of kindness. Shanley does ask us at one point to imagine that this might be the case in the only scene in the play and movie that stretches credulity to the breaking point. We are supposed to imagine that a put-upon working-class black woman in 1964–Viola Davis, who may win an Oscar for best supporting actress largely because she goes without a tissue for a few minutes–would possess an attitude so profoundly progressive that she would put the video-making opponents of California’s Proposition 8 to shame.

Perhaps such a woman existed in 1964. But there is room for, dare I say it, doubt.

John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.