Review: Doubt (3.5/5); Five Minutes of Heaven (2/5)

Doubt
(John Patrick Shanley):
Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams.
Running time: 104 minutes. (15A)

After the plastered-on smile of Mamma Mia! The Movie, Meryl Streep is back to prove she is America’s best screen actress. Of that, no doubt. She cooks up enough electricity here to power Lichtenstein.
As stagey cinema goes, Doubt is engaging. As a parable of how church child abuse was brushed under the rug, it’s riveting. Director John Patrick Shanley (who wrote the play) creates a world of vice-like church control at a school in an Irish-Italian Bronx parish in 1964.
Streep is a grim horror as Sr Aloysius, a pinch-lipped martinet. She keeps a tight rein on the students and a close eye on Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a smiling priest with a touchy-feely attitude. Amy Adams’s Sr James is a gentle naïf. She admires the compassion Fr Flynn shows, especially when he takes the school’s first black student under his wing. When the kid begins acting strangely, however, Sr James wants to give Fr Flynn the benefit of the doubt. Sr Aloysius, intuitively, does not.
The title refers not to religious doubt but to faith in religious institutions. The film plays on your own doubt too: it creates enough room for Fr Flynn to wiggle. It wants you to second-guess yourself. Sr Aloysius draws him into a verbal mousetrap. That scene between Streep and Hoffman is fizzing. She turns her monster into a human being. Shanley’s writing is as solid as a granite church, but he relies too much on the weather to make his film cinematic.

Five Minutes of Heaven
(Oliver Hirschbiegel):
Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt.
Running time: 90 minutes. (15A)

Acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s drama about Northern Ireland arrives here freighted with awards from Sundance. This two-hander, starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, and written by Guy Hippert, sets out a worthy, even self-important stall: how can we learn to forgive after the Troubles in Northern Ireland?
But the film’s demonstration of its subject is clunky and stagey. Nesbitt plays Joe. As a Catholic child he watched local protestant Alistair gun down his brother. Now the grown-up Alistair (Neeson) wants reconciliation. The effects on Joe’s family were devastating and Joe naturally fights feelings of revenge – or ‘five minutes of heaven’. The film’s first reel, set in 1970s Lurgan, plays like a heist movie. It’s expertly done: Hirschbiegel uses it to show the tragedy that occurs when explosive ideology is mixed with youthful stupidity. If only he had stopped there. What follows is un-dynamic and visually inert – a series of close-ups with jabbering voice-overs. Close your eyes and it would make a good radio play. Nesbitt is like an itch you can’t scratch. When he’s not hamming it up, he speaks in a manic voice-over that sounds like another TV commercial. Neeson’s natural reticence and melancholy brings the right kind of heft to the film. His story, of how killers too carry their own kind of ghosts, is touching.