We saw the film Doubt the other day and liked it very much.
Meryl Streep, as usual, is excellent - as well as Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The story is interesting and doesn’t go exactly where you think it is going to go. They do an excellent job of capturing the Catholic school system in the early 60’s and it was a great film to sit back and get involved.
If you are into films with dialogue, plot and characters instead of just CGI and action, you should like this film a lot.
Agreed
I liked the acting, and for the most part, the story. I would have liked a little more definitive resolution, though. I understand that the ending was meant to underline the title theme, but I think that could have been done equally well or better by showing certainty laid low.
Something I don’t get - the commercials I’ve seen seem to be marketing it as a sort of black comedy - in a way almost light-hearted. All the ones I’ve seen have some sort of joke in them. I’m not familiar with the play other than reading a few articles about the subject and an interview with Hoffman, but it definitely seems at odds with the material.
I note that if you pay very close attention and already have some knowledge you can kind of see that there’s more going on in at least one of them, but is the movie actually like this (comedy on the surface with a dark undercurrent)?
I don’t think I’ve seen any ads that give the impression of a comedy. The trailers I’ve seen pretty clearly market it as a psychological drama.
it has some moments where you will laugh but over all its a pretty dark flick
Since just about everyone in the Broadway cast got a Tony and the play itself received a Tony, why the change in casting? Was it just to have the bigger names to draw the crowds?
Comedy? I haven’t seen anything BUT the ads, and I got no hint of comedy at all, except perhaps in Streep’s delivery of the one line…which of course, I can’t remember right now, that seems a bit of a modern response, not quite in keeping with the rest of the tone. But aside from that…not a hint of funny!
I think the line you’re thinking of is something like:
“Sister, where is your compassion?”
“Nowhere you can get at it!”
rimshot
Even though they played that to death in the t.v. ads, I still loved that part.
There was plenty of comedy, although the movie was certainly not a ‘comedy’.
Parts that made me laugh or smile were;
The priests shown laughing, eating, drinking, smoking and having a ball at dinner, then a quick cut to the nuns eating in stifled silence beneath the principal’s withering gaze.
When the priest sat in the principal’s chair when she called him in for a meeting made me laugh in an uncomfortable way.
Definitely giggled when he would turn off the light, and she would turn it on; he would close the shades, she would open it.
I smiled at the bit where the younger nun says, after watching the priest indulge in too much sweet in his tea, “I don’t want any sugar, I never have any!” or something like that.
I laughed too when Streep deadpans to the young teacher nun that she needs the pope’s pic up so the she can see the kids through the glass, and they will think she has eyes in the back of her head.
I could go on, but I guess you get the idea. I saw lots to laugh at in the film. Did I mention that I loved this film and couldn’t take my eyes off Streep?
ETA: Now that I think about it, I didn’t hear anyone else in the theater laughing. Maybe the film wasn’t as comedic as I thought.
Also the “Look at that, you blew my light” line. You’re right, there were many humorous moments in the film.
Good film, though I completely misunderstood the ending and didn’t realize what had actually happened until a couple of weeks later.
[spoiler]See, I thought Sister Aloysius was carrying on about sniff sniff having doubts because of how she’d treated Father Flynn. That she was having second thoughts about making him leave the school. But the waaaah waaaah reaction seemed very overblown for what happened. Her sniveling made me roll my eyes because yeah, she was wrong, but it’s not like she ruined his life. The accusations weren’t made public, there were no headlines or arrests or trials or powerful condemning by public officials and parents. Nothing came of her suspicions. Only 4 people ever knew about the accusations (the 3 religios and the mother), and he was allowed to waltz off to another parish with not a blemish on his record. The only one it really affected was the boy, who was going to miss Father Flynn (but it’s not like he was sent to another city, so they could still hang out). If she’d ruined his life, and perhaps if he’d committed suicide over it, I could understand her being so upset at NOW having doubts about his guilt, but as it was, it just didn’t make sense to me.
It was my husband who pointed out that no, she was having doubts about her faith. Not that that made any more sense to me. Oh. Really? Nothing that came before pointed toward her thinking about a crisis of faith. [/spoiler]
In any case, terrific acting. Streep might actually win for Best Actress this time.
I don’t know if it was a crisis in religious faith so much as a crisis in faith in herself. Throughout the movie she tells everyone she’s sure of the priest’s abuse just because she’s sure of herself, even without any evidence. She just knows. She always knows. But at the end of this debacle, no evidence surfaced and there still wasn’t any certainty in what really happened, so she began to doubt if she really was as sure of it as she thought she was.
I think it was a little more complex than that. The one person who really shook her up was the boy’s mother. I think that while she was still fairly sure she was right about the priest, she had doubts about whether whatever was going on was as morally simple as she thought. I think she also had doubts about the morality of lying to try to get the priest to confess. In general, she had doubts about her own ability to know what was morally right.
The thing that makes the story work is that Shanley gives us exactly the OPPOSITE of what we’ve come to expect in modern religious dramas.
That is, a TV Movie of the Week dealing with priestly pedophilia would undoubtedly present us with a child molestor who’s a grim, Old School Catholic, and a hero or heroine who’s a progressive, enlightened priest or nun.
The drama works, in this case, precisely BECAUSE the person who’s in the right is such a repulsive figure in many respects, while the guilty party is so much more likable and admirable.
This is a movie (and play) that often makes it difficult to root for the good guy!
Saw it today and, yes, there were a few funny lines in it. My favorite is when Streep is talking to Adams about one of the students - “your job is to make sure she makes it through school intact”.
Streep was good, Hoffman was good, but the actress who played the boys mother rocked the house. You see people cry on screen all the time, but how often do you see snot coming from a criers nose? 
Haa! Yes. That made me laugh.
To expamd on this, I think it played with those prototypes as initial perceptions, but then showed those impressions to be all surface. A little closer study showed Streep as someone who genuninely cared about the kids, and Hoffman started showing a little bit of a creepy side (what was with the fingernails?).
Dude, totally. I will have to watch this again. I almost didn’t hear anything that was said during that scene because I kept staring at that line of snot slowly making its way over the top of her lip. Then she wiped it off, and a dribbler started creeping out of her other nostril. I kept waiting for Streep to hand her a kleenex. It was a nice touch.
And I thought Amy Adams did a great job as Sister James, showing her confusion she as she tries not to get caught between these imposing figures.
REPOST from the other Thread.
(If a mod sees fit to merge the Threads, this post can be deleted as a duplicate)
Interesting to see discussion here about Father Flynn’s guilt.
Though I never saw it on stage, I had read that that play left it sufficiently ambiguous- such that audience members would argue among themselves as to whether or not he did anything wrong with the boy.
Having heard about this ambiguity I was surprised to see how unambiguously guilty the character comes off in the film (to me).
Now, to see Dopers discussing it- I am surprised. I really thought his guilt was clear- and yet the contributors to this Thread did watch the exact same film I did.
My opinion, and I had this opinion fully formed upon walking out of the theater, was that although the script allowed for ambiguity, I felt like Philip Seymour Hoffman had clearly made a choice as an actor that the character was guilty. A different performance by a different actor, with absolutely no changes to the script, might have had me thinking he was innocent.
I have not seen the film, but I saw the play with my parents and my aunt and uncle a couple of years ago. My uncle is Jewish; I grew up in a vaguely Catholic but mostly secular household and attended public schools; my parents and aunt had a fairly traditionally Catholic upbringing and attended Catholic schools.
My uncle and I were the ONLY ones who thought the script left the priest’s guilt ambiguous. Everyone else thought he was plainly guilty as sin.
Make of that what you will.