Movie-Doubt

Doubt was nominated for several Oscars, including Meryl Streep for best actress, Philip Seymour Hoffman for best supporting actor, and both Viola Davis and Amy Adams for best supporting actress. None of those nominees won.

This was an actor's movie. It highlighted the actor and put their work in the spotlight. No wonder that the four major roles all received Oscar nods, and all the Oscar nods were for acting. This is not to say the actors ran rampant with the material...they were contained and focused, but really showed their craft.

Doubt (2008) is set in the early sixties, a working class Bronx Catholic neighborhood, in a school run by Sister Aloysius (Streep), in a parish overseen by priest Father Flynn (Seymour Hoffman). The two are very different, and she regards him with the suspicion of an old school Catholic versus one that came out of the relative openness of Vatican II. He wants to include people, she wants to dominate. He wants to be part of the community, she wants to oversee it.

But her doubt about Flynn becomes something more when young idealistic nun Sister James (Adams) thinks she may have stumbled upon a unhealthy liaison between Flynn and the only black student in the school.

All three actors are simply amazing, plumbing their characters depths, for levels of justification and self-deception. Not one comes out looking very good. And Viola Davis, perhaps the most honest of them all as the mother of the boy, gives a performance that while brief, is as intense and rending as you will see. And the honesty of it...of what it says about the compromises of life, you will remember.

Doubt is not about doubting whether Father Flynn actually molested the child, that much is fairly well established. Doubt is about what the right course of action is, and Davis' role is pivotal in this.

This movie is so well acted and the characters so well defined, as was a bit star struck. Streep in particular, amazed me, for I had seen her not long ago in Mamma Mia, where she was a fairly hot MILF, and here she was dried up so NOT nearly hot nun.

Doubt is an excellent movie with great performances.