'Doubt' a smart, well-acted drama of varying convictions

"I know I'm right."

With that simple declaration of faith in herself, Sister Aloysius (underplayed with taut certainty by a subdued Meryl Streep) initiates a campaign to rid her Bronx Catholic school of a priest she suspects of sexually abusing a young lad in his charge.

Is he guilty? Did he do it?

That's almost beside the point. Sister Aloysius doesn't need proof to know the truth.

In John Patrick Shanley's polemic drama "Doubt," based on his own Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, the confrontation between its two main combatants - a progressive priest and a conservative nun - becomes a philosophical war between an agent of change and a guardian of unwavering moral conviction.

This is a meaty, thinking filmgoer's movie with a strong cast and some overdone cinematic touches added by Shanley to "open up" his stage production. Although I did not like the final scene, in which a character suffers a too-abrupt breakdown for easy pity, "Doubt" is a rare, intelligent movie that wears its love for ideas on its celluloid sleeve.

Set in 1964, long before the subsequent revelations of mass child abuse by Catholic priests, "Doubt" stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as Father Flynn, whose more liberal tendencies get under Sister Aloysius' hardened skin. She disdains ballpoint pens, and he uses one. She takes her tea black. He uses not one, but three sugars.

He's also a man, and there's a slight resentment expressed by Sister Aloysius against the church's male-dominated leadership.

So when the younger and naive Sister James (Amy Adams) witnesses shy eighth-grader Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II) acting strangely after a private meeting with Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, the school's principal, instantly determines the priest must be exposed and stopped.

Father Flynn denies the allegations, but Sister Aloysius knows he's lying. How?

"Experience," she says.

The movie's most surprising and absorbing scene takes place when Sister Aloysius goes for a walk with Donald's mother, Mrs. Miller (a devastating, gripping performance by Viola Davis), hoping to gain her support by voicing her suspicions about the priest.

"Do I care why a man is being kind to my son?" Mrs. Miller replies. "No."

Sister Aloysius is stunned by the woman's reaction. But as the mother of the only black student in the all-white school, Mrs. Miller is grateful that Father Flynn has protected her son from racist bullies. After all, she says, "It's just until June."

Shanley's "Doubt" retains the intensity of a well-crafted stage play, while it expands to make use of cinematic symbolism, including birds (first a white pigeon, then a black crow) and enough foreshadowing thunderstorms to irrigate the Sahara Desert.

"What do you do when you're not sure?" Father Flynn asks during his opening sermon.

As a filmmaker, Shanley doesn't appear to have that problem.

"Doubt"

Rating: 3 stars

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

Directed by: John Patrick Shanley

A Miramax Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for thematic material. 104 minutes