Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays Father Flynn and Amy Adams portrays Sister James in Doubt.

Miramax films / Andrew Schwartz

Acting on not much more than a hunch, a stiff-backed nun decides that the parish priest has made inappropriate advances to one of the boys in her school and pushes to get Father Flynn removed in Doubt. A movie of great dramatic fireworks, Doubt is as far from The Bells of St. Mary’s as one can get.

Academy Award-winners Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman are the oil and water ingredients at the center of the hurricane in Doubt, going head to head in top form. And they have good material to work with in John Patrick Shanley’s tightly coiled script. Shanley wrote and directed the film, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

Cleverly, Shanley sets up a situation in which even those who come out solidly on one side or the other at first may find themselves wavering the more they examine the evidence, or lack of evidence. As Hoffman’s Father Flynn says at the start of the film in a sermon, doubt can be as powerful and sustaining a feeling as certainty.

Set in 1964 Brooklyn, it’s clear from the start that Sister Aloysius (Streep) and Father Flynn are poised for conflict. He wants the church to be an inclusive, big happy family and for its members to see the clergy as people who can lend a sympathetic ear in times of trouble. When he tells her this, she recoils. “But we’re different,” she protests.

As played by Streep, Sister Aloysius is a force to be reckoned with. The principal of St. Nicholas School, she barks orders like a drill sergeant, getting the kids to snap to attention whenever she looms over them. When first we see her, she’s patrolling the aisles of St. Nicholas Church during Father Flynn’s sermon, shushing chatty children, hissing “Straighten up!” to a boy whose head is draped over the back of the pew in front of him. She has rules and they must be obeyed without question. Any infraction is met with immediate retribution. When she finds a ball-point pen on the floor of a classroom she is incensed, having forbidden them in the belief that they contribute to poor penmanship.

A frustrated control freak, Sister Aloysius feels the world — and the Catholic Church — are “crashing” and fears that a new wind is blowing that might sweep away all the rigid beliefs she has embraced. She doesn’t trust Father Flynn’s new, more open ideas on Catholicism, which she sees as a tightly knit structure with a chain of command leading right up to the pope. In behind-the-scenes moments, however, we see that the rules she so staunchly holds dear have made for a two-tier system, with the nuns much more cloistered than the priests.

Sister Aloysius fears Father Flynn and his ideas of compassion will influence the naïve and sensitive Sister James (Amy Adams), the youngest nun at the school, and weaken her own autocratic control over the convent. And so she has begun looking for chinks in Father Flynn’s armor, planting seeds of doubt about him with the other nuns.

Sister Aloysius sees her chance to bring down the priest when Sister James raises suspicions about his behavior toward a new boy in school, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the first African-American to attend St. Nicholas. Sister James reports that when Donald returned to her class after a private meeting with Father Flynn in the rectory, “There was alcohol on his breath.”

It’s something that sets Sister Aloysius’ mind leaping into uncharted territory, setting her off on a determined campaign. “It’s my job to outshine the fox in cleverness. It’s my job,” she rails as she begins setting the stage for what will be an explosive confrontation.

It doesn’t matter to her that she has no evidence on which to base her suspicions. “But I have my certainty,” she says evenly. Father Flynn might protest all he wants, but she is determined to remain unmoved, even when he gives what seems a plausible explanation.

A sequence in which Sister Aloysius meets with the boy’s mother (Viola Davis, who grew up in Central Falls and is a graduate of Rhode Island College) is revealing about what is at stake on both sides here. Their meeting is a roller coaster ride of emotions, beginning straightforwardly and ending with a poignant plea by Mrs. Miller to the nun regarding her son’s future. The scene is played touchingly and with great emotion by Davis, who received both Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild supporting actress nominations for her performance.

Shanley boldly emphasizes the witch hunt aspects of the situation and builds the tension to the boiling point. He seems to come out solidly on the side of Father Flynn. As played by Hoffman, Father Flynn seems a kind and considerate man whose compassion has led him to take the boy under his wing because the child doesn’t yet fit in at the school.

Streep, on the other hand, plays Sister Aloysius as a self-righteous, self-assured and frustrated woman who is unbending as she weaves her suspicions into a chilling reality. No matter how much he protests, Father Flynn finds himself, like a ship heading for rocky shoals in a storm, up against an immovable object. (Streep and Hoffman have also been nominated for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards.)

And yet, because Shanley never shows us what actually happened between the boy and the priest, he has sewn seeds of doubt. The film’s resolution, which at first almost seems too simple and trite, is shocking in retrospect.

There is no doubt, however, about the power these magnetic actors create in their big confrontation scene. As they try to tear down each other’s arguments and convince each other — and us — that they each know the truth, one is rocked by the force they unleash.

****Doubt

Starring: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Joseph Foster II.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com