Beware the priest who puts sugar in his coffee
Freddie Sayers on a battle between tradition and free thinking that may tell you something about yourself
6 February 2009

Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is a comically fierce headmistress suspicious of the changes of the Sixties

I don't think it will count as a spoiler if I tell you that Doubt is one of those "did he or didn't he?" stories where they never tell you the answer. You are supposed to make up your own mind and argue about it afterwards. I would normally be slightly irritated by such a deliberate conceit except that, both when I saw the original play on Broadway and in its new film incarnation, it worked on me. Despite the obvious fact that there was no "right answer" I made up my mind firmly, and seemed to reach a different conclusion than the other people I watched it with.

It's 1964 in a Catholic school in the Bronx. Modern, cool Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a newly installed priest attempting to relax some of the school's strict customs, guarded by the comically fierce Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the principal.

What starts as a conventional battle between tradition and free thinking suddenly becomes darker when innocent young Sister James (Amy Adams), on the advice of Sister Aloysius to "be vigilant" about Fr Flynn, reports her concern that the priest may be rather too friendly with the school's first black pupil. This is all Sister Aloysius needs - despite the lack of evidence, she is convinced of Fr Flynn's guilt and sets about the challenge of having him removed.

You are aware from early on that you are supposed to be forming your own judgment as to the priest's guilt: it sets about its formal dialectic with the strictness of a stage play. Indeed, the whole thing is so remarkably stagey and similar to the play that you can tell that the playwright is directing. It works well, but it could have been better served by a new perspective.

The choice is between an old woman's instinct and a man's genial logic. Sister Aloysius knows that she knows the world by now, and she takes a strong and harsh view on most people. She doesn't like Fr Flynn anyway, as he embodies the political changes that were rushing through America in the Sixties. His nails are a little long; he takes three sugars in his coffee; he uses a ballpoint pen.

Despite her fierceness with the schoolboys, she shows a softer side to some of her nuns and is carefully designed to be a strangely likeable character. Ultimately, you choose whether she is a bitter old stickler conspiracy theorist who ruins lives in her quest to keep control, or a prescient, brave woman of the earth successfully protecting her brood.

Fr Flynn, meanwhile, is intellectual and fun, and gives wonderful personal sermons. He is the reverse of Sister Aloysius: instantly likeable but with the facts against him. The scenes between the two of them, although very theatrical, are fantastic, as the two forces square up to each other.

As Sister Aloysius puts together more and more circumstantial evidence for her theory that Fr Flynn is up to no good, we are invited to suspect him as well. He drinks rather too heartily with his fellow churchmen; he looks rather too pained when he gives his sermons about guilt; and why does he keep changing school?

This film is like one of those online personality tests: what do your conclusions reveal about you? Specifically, "what do you do when you're not sure?" Do you choose doubt, or do you choose faith?

I confess that both times I came down firmly on the side of the priest. To me it was clear that he was a good man and should be given the benefit of the doubt. And yet the majority of the audience, when they did a show of hands in the theatrical production, was on the side of Sister Aloysius and felt sure he was guilty.

I think my instinct came down to the relationship between what is and what you choose to believe. The structure of the film implies a separate truth that can be glimpsed by intuition and evidence. But is it really separate? Sister Aloysius reminded me of one of those intelligent, paranoid types who somehow manages by casting around aspersions to make it so. The type you find in George Eliot's Middlemarch or reading gossip magazines and who end up doing terrible things like burning witches. Oh, better to be stupid and kind! You choose what world you live in, and if you believe something bad strongly enough eventually it will be so. If you believe the best of people, are they not more likely to be good?

Fr Flynn's sermon about doubt - how it is part of faith, and brings people together - was what got Sister Aloysius so suspicious in the first place. She can certainly not be accused of doubting the veracity of her own moral convictions. But remember Coleridge's thought about faith, that through the actions of committing to Christianity "come the evidences that would convince you of its truth". If what you believe can somehow influence what is, faced with the choice should you not always believe the better thing?

You will probably take a different view. With the prospect of child abuse, a rather more matter of fact approach would certainly be easier to justify. But go and see it, and listen to your own instincts - you might find out something about yourself.