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My first encounter with Doubt was reading John Patrick Shanley’s fine, fine play in a park in Worcester, Mass. I was on breaks from full-time rehearsals at Foothills Theatre there. What a read! Powerful, wonderful, beyond good. I knew I wanted to select a monologue, eventually settled on some lines from the scene where Father Flynn and Sister James talk in the courtyard.

Then, just a few months later, I worked on the set of Brotherhood with Brian O’Bryne, the talented actor who originated the role of Father Flynn. In our brief conversations, I mentioned that scene to him and he told me of shifting his approach to it, ending up with something much less strident or aggressive than during first rehearsals. He also told me that his girlfriend was the actor who portrayed Sister James — that’s how they met. Other discussions were about his more-recent work in The Coast of Utopia so I never got around to asking him what he and Shanley decided on as back story for Father Flynn’s guilt. Sure wish I’d asked that!

Fast forward a year, and a solid production of Doubt in Gloucester was the last piece of theater I saw in Massachusetts before leaving for California. I knew all four of the actors, and I saw there one of my favorite Boston performances of 2008. Originally, I thought I might be jealous of my friend Lewis, who was portraying Father Flynn, but his strong performance and my impending departure and a million other factors resulted in me just absorbing, appreciating, being moved and grateful.

Now here’s the thing. All three of these experiences were stronger and better experiences than watching Doubt in a movie theater on New Year’s Day. It’s a good movie, but these other things were beyond good. Streep, Hoffman, Adams, Davis, others — all are great actors whose work I enjoyed and learned from. (Loved Amy Adams so much, just as I loved Melissa Baroni’s performance in Gloucester. It’s a great role.) But there are key differences that matter so much!

In the play, the very first thing is Father Flynn’s sermon on doubt, directed to the audience. You attend the play, you attend his sermon. That is key. Conversely, the film opens with families getting ready for church, altar boys preparing, street scenes for a sense of time and place (1964, the Bronx) and then after a while you observe Flynn’s sermon — observe rather than experience. The same difference applies to reading the play, versus seeing the movie. When reading that sermon, it spoke to me personally. And I’m not at all Cathloic! The movie, while good, is simply more removed.

As the plot unfolds without us seeing any of the children, the play allows for an amazing journey in the mind. Reading the play, working on monologues from it, seeing a strong production — all allowed for me to have rewarding, extraordinary meditation. The movie, to be sure, is very worthy of post-popcorn contemplation, and I’m happy for that. I’m sure that this good mental thing happens much more after this movie than after, say, The Dark Knight. But the movie “takes us from the realm of philosophical meditation to one of evidentiary fact-finding, where every expression is scrutinized for incriminating information.”¹ And this is why it’s not as good as the play. The film’s realism makes it smaller. No more meditation, just facts. Remember: it’s supposed to be about doubt.

Somewhere in the above, probably more than in Hoffman’s acting work, lies the reason that the movie’s Father Flynn seemed to me more arbitrary in his reactions. More ambiguous for the sake of ambiguity. More like an exercise in writing. Not for a second did I have such heretical thoughts before seeing the movie. Some play-going audience members see him as guilty, some as not guilty; all see their opinion as clearly the only right one. In that sense, you can think what you want about Flynn. But don’t you want to think, “He did it” or “He didn’t do it,” instead of “I don’t get it”? (Or maybe the movie set him up as clearly guilty, while the play is more wonderfully ambiguous, and I don’t want him to be a pedophile.)

Maybe if you haven’t been exposed to Doubt before seeing the movie, none of my ramblings will make sense. If you know the piece beforehand, however, you may feel like I did, that you are seeing a good, but distracting, production — just like the snot you see running down Viola Davis’s face as she pleads with Sister Aloysius. Is it bad? No, how can it be? It’s real, it’s honest, it shows great work from a creative artist. But it’s distracting as hell.