Doubt

Be forewarned: There are spoilers in this review!

When we first see Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in Doubt, she's patrolling the aisles of St. Nicholas Church in the Bronx on a Sunday morning in 1964, making sure all of the children are paying attention to Father Flynn's sermon. Dressed in black, her skin pale and her face pinched, she quiets the talkative ones and gives the sleepy a whack on the back of the head.

Streep is a fierce and fearsome presence throughout the entire movie, railing against ballpoint pens and poor penmanship and believes in Catholic tradition to the point where she opposes secular songs in the school's Christmas pageant.

At the same time, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a pink-faced, genial, gregarious and smiling Father Brendan Flynn, the parish priest who wants the church to be a more welcoming, friendlier place for its working class Italian and Irish flock.

The contrast between the two is stark. And it sets up a fascinating question over whom to believe when Sister Aloysius, the school principal, accuses Father Flynn of molesting a 12-year-old student. Is the priest guilty or is he a victim of a witch hunt by a nun who opposes his efforts at a more modern, approachable church?

I think part of the power of this movie version of John Patrick Shanley's Tony and Pulitzer-winning play is that you can have an endless discussion over it. There are good arguments on both sides. While other viewers may come to a different conclusion in the end, I really had no doubt. Although Doubt takes place in 1964, I couldn't help but see it through a 21st-century prism.

Incidents of sexual abuse against children by Roman Catholic priests have been well documented over the past decade. Some have gone to prison and dioceses all over the United States have paid out millions of dollars to hundreds of alleged victims of thousands of priests. From what we learn about Father Flynn over the course of the movie, he certainly seems to fit the pattern of abusive priests. I have no doubt that he was guilty.

What struck me as truly fascinating about Doubt was the cat-and-mouse game between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn. She has to tread very carefully because as the priest, he has all the power in their relationship. She knows that he'll be protected by the higher-ups in the church. I suspect that when priests were abusing children, the nuns had their well-founded suspicions, especially nuns like Sister Aloysius, who seems to have eyes in the back of her head.

I never saw the play, but apparently on stage there are only four characters in Doubt: Father Flynn; Sister Aloysius; Sister James, a young nun; and the mother of Donald Miller, the school's first and only black student, whom Sister Aloysius suspects Father Flynn of abusing. The theatre audience never sees Donald, or any children.

In filming his play Shanley, who wrote the screenplay and directs, shows us the children, in school and in church. I don't want to give too much away but for me, there were a few things that I think stacked the deck against the priest. One of those was, simply, seeing the children. Joseph Foster II plays Donald as just about the quietest, most meek and well-behaved child in the school. As the only black student, he's also the most isolated and vulnerable.

In the end, Sister Aloysius is pretty much out there on a limb with her suspicions. Viola Davis gives a powerful, compelling performance as Donald's mother. She's fearful for her son's future and mostly seems happy to have the priest looking out for him. And Amy Adams plays the young Sister James as sweet and trusting, who definitely feels aligned with Father Flynn's more modern, tolerant views.

At the beginning of Doubt, Streep's Sister Aloysius isn't a very sympathetic character but by the end, I really did respect her. She's stern and tough but she cares about those kids. No matter what she thought of Father Flynn's theology, I don't think there's any way she'd defy him over it. After all, he's a priest and nuns are taught to defer to priests.

But if she thought for an instant that a priest was hurting one of the children in her care, you better believe she'd move heaven and earth to get him out of her school.

Making a play for Hollywood

My first introduction to theatre probably came from television, from watching classic musicals when I was a kid. As an adult, movies and television have also served as my introduction to quite a few plays. So I thought this Variety article, about the process of turning a play into a movie, was pretty interesting.

The story ties in with two upcoming movies based on recent Broadway plays: Frost/Nixon, with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, which opens Dec. 26, and Doubt, starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, which opens Jan. 8.

John Patrick Shanley is no stranger to writing for the big screen. He won an Oscar for Moonstruck. But he says that turning Doubt into a screenplay was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. You ask, 'Does the play have a compelling story to tell? Is it a tone poem, or a theatrical trick that could not be replicated on film? Is it basically a character study?' Doubt on one level, is a whodunit. It has that going for it."

Playwright Tracy Letts, who's working on the screenplay of his Pulitzer and Tony-winning August: Osage County, says that part of the challenge lies in translating stage diction to screen dialog. "In plays there is a heightened theatrical quality to language. It doesn't necessarily play on film. It can sound wooden. Without de-boning it, flaying the piece, you have to find a way to translate the language. It's scalpel kind of work."

The article notes that in recent years, stage-to-screen adaptations have been underwhelming at the box office. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that they can be hard to find at your local multiplex, which insists on putting The Dark Knight or the latest Judd Apatow comedy in six screens. That doesn't leave much room for smaller movies.

At one point, theatre was fertile ground for movies, and the Variety article wonders whether we'll see a comeback. In fact, my all-time favorite movie, Casablanca, was adapted from a play that was never produced, called Everybody Comes to Rick's.

A movie that I loved when I saw it years ago was Plenty, an adaptation of the play by David Hare. It starred Meryl Streep as an Englishwoman whose life in postwar Britain seems to pale in comparison with the war years, which she spent as a Resistance fighter. I'm not sure I even realized that it had been a play.

Today, a lot of the more noteworthy adaptations of plays have been done by HBO, including Angels in America and Wit. Sometimes, those adaptations can be a bit dutiful and dull rather than truly engaging and exhilarating. But I did enjoy Angels in America and Wit, and without HBO, I never would have had a chance to see either one of them.

Part of the question has always been whether you attract established Hollywood stars or stick to the original cast. The History Boys is a play that imported pretty much its entire Broadway cast to the screen. I enjoyed the movie and I appreciated the chance to see the same actors who created those characters on stage. In Frost/Nixon, Sheen and Langella are reprising their Broadway roles.

And the movie version of August: Osage County won't have trouble attracting household names. Producer Jean Doumanian says that while the film hasn't been cast yet, she's been inundated with calls from agents whose big-name clients have seen the play in New York.

But just as on Broadway, the audience for a straight play is smaller than the audience for a musical. I'm hoping that Doubt, and a few years down the line, August: Osage County, can fire up moviegoers. I've never seen Doubt, but August: Osage County, with its witty, blistering dialogue and truly memorable characters, certainly has the capacity to do that.

Veteran Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg is blunt about the hurdle. "Some people like films with dialogue. But there are only 18 of them, and 94 million want to see the bus that crashes into the plane."