From the prize-winning stage play by John Patrick Shanley, an ambiguous drama of possible priestly pedophilia at a Catholic school in the Bronx. The playwright, perhaps best known to moviegoers as the writer of Moonstruck and writer-director of Joe versus the Volcano, handles the direction of his own work on screen, and the freedoms of the medium enable him to detail operations of the parish to almost anthropological ends: the nuns’ rising and dressing in the A.M., the altar boys’ preparations for Mass, the crosscutting contrast between the bloody-roast-beef and red-wine dinner table of the jovial priests as against the silent and austere table of the milk-fed nuns, the students’ coed dance lesson to “Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” and so on. (The time, as the aforesaid musical selection would suggest, is early Sixties, the time of the playwright’s own Catholic boyhood in the Bronx, although the sermon on communal despair after the JFK assassination — one of three pithy sermons in the script — could easily have been recycled post-9/11.) The three principal characters are types: the progressive priest who believes in a “friendlier” church that moves with the times, a friendliness that may or may not have gone too far in embracing the school’s first black student, a vulnerable target; the hidebound and humorless old nun (“Penmanship is dying, all across this country”) whose hawklike vigilance zeroes in on the priest; and the innocent and idealistic novice, young and pretty, who wants to believe the best of everyone. The clash of personalities, strictly limited by the play’s title and tactical guideline, illuminates nothing so much as the players. Meryl Streep, overacting awesomely, is not only a holy terror as a nun but as a thespian, booby-trapping every scene with unforeseeable little diversions, inventions, stratagems, embellishments. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, no slouches themselves, appear to enjoy their one scene alone together in the courtyard, no one to steal it from them, no one to show them up or slap them down. With Viola Davis and Joseph Foster. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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