Doubt

Rating:

* * *

Verdict:

Streep was never so over the top.

Put the ring around it: if Meryl Streep doesn't win the Oscar for her work in Shanley's screen adaptation of his hit play, everyone will click their tongues and say that she should have won.

Well, not quite everyone. For my money, Streep turns in the most scenery-chewing performance of a distinguished career as Sister Aloysius, the righteous and right-thinking nun at the centre of this ostentatious and ponderous moral fable. It's a god-awful piece of work, faintly maniacal and not helped by the fact that she and her fellow sisters wear lampshade-stiff bonnets that make them look like widow-women extras in a production of

The Crucible

.

The title of Shanley's Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning play, which the Auckland Theatre Company staged with Elizabeth Hawthorne in the Streep role, semaphores that the essence of the drama will be ambiguity. But Sister Aloysius' unexpected final utterance - which I won't spoil here - comes across less as an underlining of the point than as a sign that the writer hasn't got to grips with his subject. It's a cop-out, and because it incidentally mocks those of us who might have been hoping for some dramatic - never mind moral - coherence, it verges on the offensive.

Sister Aloysius is in charge of the nuns at St Nicholas' School in the Bronx in 1964. It's a man's world, and the play passes up no opportunity to underline that, showing the priests (among them Hoffman's Father Flynn) as complacent whiskey-and-cigarettes layabouts waited on by the pious and abstemious sisterhood.

Sister Aloysius, who is plagued (or blessed depending on your point of view) with inchoate suspicions about Father Flynn, enlists the aid of the timorous junior Sister James (Adams) to keep her eyes open. When she in turn comes up with information suggestive of improper behaviour towards a young student, the older nun's hawk-eye swoops.

What follows is a studied and rather stagey duel of wits - complete with effects like a storm to accompany a crisis of faith - which toys with ideas while refusing to take hold of any of them. It deploys uncertainty - doubt, actually - not as a dramatic device but instead of one.

In contrast to Streep, Hoffman's acting is precise and nuanced, the work of a man who has decided he knows who his character is even if the writer doesn't. But both are outshone by Davis' brilliant cameo as the student's mother, who is, oddly, the film's most morally self-assured figure.

It's a triumph of production design - you can practically smell the floor polish and the starch on the linen - and Boston in winter never looked so bleak and cheerless. But in the end this is a film for people who like plays - in particular if they pronounce "theatre" as three syllables.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis

Director:

John Patrick Shanley

Running time:

104 mins

Rating:

M Screening: Berkeley, Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto