Dir. John Patrick Shanley, US, 2008, 104 mins
Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Review by Carol Allen
For his feature directing follow-up to Joe Versus the Volcano , Shanley has adapted his own play for the screen. While I am unfashionably an admirer of dialogue-heavy films, provided the writing is literate and perceptive, this one really shows its origins as a theatre piece and it might have been helpful, in this instance, had producer Scott Rudin insisted Shanley work with a co-writer, who had written for the screen before and was better versed in the language of film.
The story is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964. It kicks off when Sister James (Adams) reports to the headmistress Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Streep) her suspicions, carefully couched in the euphemistic language of the period, that the school's charismatic priest Father Flynn (Hoffman) appears to be taking an inappropriate interest in the school's first and only black pupil Donald (Joseph Foster II). Sister Aloysius is a traditionalist, who disapproves of Father Flynn's modern ways and his efforts to reform the school's customs, from introducing a secular song into the Christmas pageant to his use of a ballpoint pen, so she sets about her investigation with relish. In what becomes largely a series of confrontations between the nun and the priest, we are never sure whether Flynn is really a child abuser or whether she is being deceived by her own prejudice against him, hence the title.
The actors all give good performances and this is an interesting and relevant story but despite that, it is a very minor piece, whose plethora of Oscar nominations (five, including best adapted screenplay) is somewhat baffling. Streep is brisk, scary, very commanding and frequently funny, while Hoffman is interestingly ambiguous. One moment he convinces you that he's a compassionate and misunderstood figure, the next raises dark suspicions that he is genuinely a sexual predator. The scenes between the two of them are confrontational, dramatic, very theatrical and probably lifted wholesale from the play. The film-stealing performance comes from Viola Davis as Danny's mother, who admits to Sister Aloysius her determination to keep her son at the school and give him a chance of a better future, no matter what the truth is about Flynn. The film never, however, really gets to grips with the central issue, skirting round it rather than grasping the nettle, something which to be fair could be argued as being of the period. It also implicitly makes some interesting though by no means new points about the inequality of men and women in the Church hierarchy. It would also have been interesting to know a bit more about the origins of the order which runs the school, where the nuns wear peculiar bonnets reminiscent of the days of the Pilgrim Fathers, who weren't of course Catholic — quite the opposite!
Well acted and not without merit, this is still something of a cinematic lost opportunity, whose blatant theatricality, combined with its treatment of the subject gives it a distinctly old-fashioned air.
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