Doubt: B

With much symbolic wringing of his hands, writer-director John Patrick Shanley fussily brings his previously Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play Doubt to the screen—and yet the ironic thing is, the transition itself brings about much of the titular emotion. Sure, the central quartet of Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis seem qualified enough—but in the opening thirty minutes Streep, that grand dame of accents and method sublimation of self into character, gives a performance of such sheer overheated nonsense (with speech inflections and physical tics that border on rococo) that she threatens to leave the audience laughing, instead of pondering, at the pile of melodramatic entanglements at St. Nicholas’ Catholic School.

Luckily her performance slows and blossoms, minute by minute, into something far more recognizable as derived from quality instead of Quaaludes, and as it softens and comes into focus, so inversely does the narrative—hardening, sharpening, itself. It goes like this: Streep, as Sister Aloysius, suspects her only black student (Joseph Foster II) of having been advanced on inappropriately by Father Flynn (played by Hoffman with a disarming vulnerability); her suspicions are strengthened by the opinions of Sister James (Adams, who is the only of the main four to truly hit the film’s rhythm of comedy and naturalism smothered by an overarching Gothic tragedy). So she launches a campaign to reveal and remove the priest. At one point her quest takes her into contact with the young boy’s mother (who is inhabited by Davis with a force of conviction that lends her every subversive line an extra twist of spiteful, saddening, regret) and their scene together brings the film crackling to life.

Yet here’s the thing: Doubt is an artful enough experiment in unsettling and disturbing an audience’s sympathies and points-of-view—it plants seeds of uncertainty and unease with a literate grace (as with Father Flynn’s beautiful opening sermon). However Shanley is by no means a confident director (his camera stubbornly pulls the viewer’s eye to the most obvious of symbols and visual allegories with a ham-fisted redundancy), and on the whole he elicits merely adequate performances from his A-list cast. Thematically, the film (as the play before it) is concerned chiefly with an atmosphere of hushed paranoia that creeps, with subtlety and much justification, into the mind of the viewer until Doubt itself prevails everywhere. But there is much too much drama—loud, obvious, persistent, emotional—in this drama for that to take place. The movie unsettles, but that emotional integrity comes at the cost of elegant presentation.

“In Ancient Sparta, important matters were decided by who could shout the loudest. Luckily, we are not in Ancient Sparta,” Sister Aloysius says, half-way through. Coming away from the closing-credits, though, Meryl, I wouldn’t be so sure.