Last year James Christopher wrote an article in The Times detailing tips on how to become a professional film critic. His main point was that the critic should never write a boring sentence because you lose the audience: that is Meryl Streep's approach to her performance in John Patrick Shanley's film of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Doubt.
There are three main characters in this story and each of them are approached by the actors playing them in different ways. The set up is very simple, at a school run by the Catholic church in post-Kennedy 60s America a young nun (Amy Adams) who teaches the 8th Grade sees a priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) summon a boy to the rectory, who returns acting strangely and having alcohol on his breath. A week later she reports this to her superior (Streep), who based on conviction rather than tangible proof starts a crusade against the priest.
Streep's performance is very much that, a performance, you rarely forget you're watching Meryl Streep act, but in the vein of The Devil Wears Prada it's deliberately like that and consistently entertaining. Adams serves her character much better giving a delightfully restrained, soulful, natural performance, which is the antithesis of Streep's approach. Somewhere in the middle is Hoffman, who is frequently pushed to overt stagey-ness by Shanley, but manages to show some real vulnerabilty and subtlety on occasion. Shanley is the reason for the inbalance of performance as he cannot reign Streep in and is probably too close to the material's roots on the stage to extract a more cinematic tone of performance from her, especially in her scenes with Hoffman. All three performances are very good, they just reach that level in varying ways and due to the nature of the medium, Adams quietly steals the show.
That said though the writing and characterisation is what makes it work because it is structured very much as a battle of wills with the innocent left in the middle, which mirrors the acting. If there is a problem with the writing it is that the question as to whether or not Hoffman's character has molested the boy is too definitely answered and doesn't address very interesting side-issues stemming from that. Shanley's direction in the main is fine, the film rattles along, and just like James Christopher suggests, is never dull, but a more experienced hand would not have gone for such overt and simplistic symbolism throughout.
Despite its flaws, which are not inconsiderable, this is a very entertaining film with flashes of brilliance and the occasional scene which is perfectly done. It's just a shame that the director prevents it from being the modern classic it could have been (due to the ridiculously talented cast) had he not had such an uneven approach between the tone of the performances and the piece as a whole, and distilled the more interesting aspects of his story in the simplification of the issues.