Doubt

John Patrick Shanley's serious adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a complex meditation on Catholic guilt that veers between being tense and compelling in certain scenes to po-faced and obvious in others. Set in a Catholic school in 1964, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) suspects the friendly Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of sexually abusing Donald, a black altar boy. Acting on the shyly-voiced suspicions of the idealistic Sister James (Amy Adams), Aloysius attempts to hound Flynn out of the parish, insisting that she doesn't need proof, all she needs is her "certainty".

There's plenty to admire here but not an awful lot to love. What Doubt excels at is character motivation. We're not sure on why Aloysius pursues Flynn with such vigour or whether Flynn is guilty of what she accuses him of. There's one particularly memorable scene with Viola Davis as Donald's mother. To say any more would rob the scene of its dramatic impact but suffice to say that it's uncomfortable and provocative in the way that good cinema should be. Shanley's direction is unfussy but he's unable to overcome the stagey-ness of his central conceit, and is too reliant on metaphor to get his point across (the storm constantly raging outside, a lamb placed in a Nativity scene with an air of significance). He is, however, ably served by four actors all on the top of their game. Davis and Streep are especially electric, whilst Hoffman and Adams provide nuanced, intelligent riffs on similar roles in their back catelogue. It's a clever film but it's also one that is, for the most part, distant and emotionally uninvolving.