Talk Bronx New York

Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius

  ‘Penmanship is dying!” lamented Sister Aloysius when she found a forbidden ballpoint pen in a classroom in the movie “Doubt,” set in a Bronx Catholic grammar school in 1964.

It came out on DVD last week, and to watch it was to conjure thoughts of growing up Catholic in the Bronx on the cusp of Vatican II.

It was a time and place that molded a population, and will never be seen again. Only those of us who went through it, like Marines who made it through Parris Island, can believe how it really was.

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                                                     Streep plays a strict nun who suspects a priest of abusing a child

 With a cast headed by Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman and another Oscar winner in the director’s chair, it is hardly surprising film drama Doubt has been showered with accolades.

Even more so when you consider the 2004 stage play on which it is based won four Tonys and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Small wonder, then, that when Streep, her co-star Amy Adams and director John Patrick Shanley were in London last month, the words “Academy” and “Award” were never far from journalists’ lips.

Their arrival in the capital coincided with the news that their picture had received three Bafta nominations to add to the five Golden Globe nods it received in December.

Since then Doubt has been shortlisted for five Oscars, with both Streep and Adams among those in contention.

Streep was also named best actress at the Screen Actors Guild awards on 25 January.

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The air is thick with paranoia in “Doubt,” but nowhere as thick, juicy, sustained or sustaining as Meryl Streep’s performance as a distrustful nun in John Patrick Shanley’s screen adaptation of his stage play. Wearing flowing black robes, a bonnet that squats on her head like an upside-down Easter basket and the kind of spectacles Mr. Pickwick probably wore to read his papers, Ms. Streep blows in like a storm, shaking up the story’s reverential solemnity with gusts of energy and comedy. The performance may make no sense in the context of the rest of the film, but it is — forgive me, Father — gratifying nunsense.

Although the play, which pivots on accusations of child molestation, was first staged in 2004 — two years after the Roman Catholic Church sex-abuse scandals erupted in America — it unfolds at a historical remove in 1964. Sister Aloysius (Ms. Streep), the principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx, comes to suspect that her supervisor, Father Flynn (a tamped-down Philip Seymour Hoffman), has developed an erotic interest or worse in one of their charges, Donald (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first and only black student. Shored up by the tentative suspicions of a younger nun, Sister James (an unsteady Amy Adams), Sister Aloysius begins circling Father Flynn, going in for the kill. Sister James has doubts. Sister Aloysius has, well, none. Read more..

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