No Doubt — It’s a really good film
I have a huge back load of things to do and to write about. I do plan to go back to my John Paul I posts soon, I promise. Another subject is film. We’ve already had the Golden Globes and Oscar nominations this year, but I didn’t watch. My TV was broken. I hope to have it fixed by Oscar night! (However, I am now more anxious than ever to see Slumdog Millionaire).
I have seen several films that seem poised for Oscar nods, including Changeling, Wall-E, Doubt, and Frost/Nixon.
The last two films were the ones that I was most interested in seeing — in both cases, because I had seen other works by their talented writers. And as it turned out, both ended up with Oscar nominations. I’ll write about Frost/Nixon (by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen) later on.
For right now, I want to write about Doubt, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, based on his own 2004 Tony-Award winning Broadway play. I have always loved the Oscar-winning film he wrote, Moonstruck, and in particular the poetic writing. I was quite interested in this play, though I didn’t get a chance to see it on stage.
Set in St. Nicolas Catholic parish and school in the Bronx in 1964, Doubtt begins calmly with an ordinary day in a largely Irish Catholic neighborhood. Grim-faced Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) patrols the aisles in class and even in church, to make sure her charges don’t get out of hand (and gives them a smack on the head if they do). Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the new young priest who wants to bring the “winds of change” to the Church and this parish in particular. He is kind to the kids, especially young Donald Muller, the school’s only black student. Sister Aloysius doesn’t like change. She likes absolute certainty. And the fact that Father Flynn gives sermons on “doubt” has her worried. Then one day sweet young Sister James (Amy Adams) tells her she saw Donald going to the rectory alone with Father Flynn, and coming back upset. Has he done something unspeakable to the boy?
Sister James isn’t willing to transform her suspicions into an outright accusation; Sister Aloysius has no such qualms. She practically declares the priest guilty of molestation before she has heard all the evidence — and the evidence is ambiguous. Al the same, she will use every means, fair or not, at her disposal to have him removed from the parish. She tries to enlist the boy’s mother (Viola Davis) on her side, with unexpected and disturbing results. Sister Aloysius may experience setbacks, but she plows ahead without admitting any doubts.
In the end, the film doesn’t leave us with certainty about anything, even the priest’s guilt — and the final scene is unsettling for anyone who thought they knew what was going on.
What is doubt? Do we need it? Can we live with it? Father Flynn explains in his sermon that doubt and uncertainty is one of the things that most binds human beings together. Sister James is torn because of her uncertainty. Donald’s mother expresses some doubts about things no one has ever questioned (and that most people in the audience won’t think can be questioned). Sister Aloysius alone seems certain — but she admits that in pursuing her case she may be “taking a step away from God but in His service.”
Shanley has said in an interview that the play “is about the way I process the world — which involves a great deal of certainty and also a great deal of doubt.” He says he thinks doubt is vital in human life.
I found the film very absorbing and thought-provoking. It presented a very even-handed approach to the question of priestly abuse, even though that was not really what the film was about. It gives a good picture of the things that can and have gone wrong in the Church that made the abuse situation possible, including the hierarchical boys’ club mentality of the priesthood that leaves little room for interference by a mere nun. The contrast between the priests and nuns is made clear in a scene that alternates between a jolly red-meat dinner of the priests in the rectory who spend their time joking about women, and the austere meal of the nuns, who worry about one elderly nun being dismissed because she is half-blind. In another scene, Sister Aloysius and Sister James almost reflexively serve tea to Father Flynn while preparing to accuse him of an unspeakable crime. The film does make it clear, at any rate, that it is possible for an accused priest to actually be innocent.
Some scenes will also bring some knowing smiles to Catholics who recall the early days of the Vatican II and the changes it brought — particularly in one scene involving a picture of Pope Pius XII, which I won’t spoil for you. Shanley never gets much into the specifics of the changes in the Church, which might disappoint some, and which I certainly missed, but this might have distracted the audience from the story.
The big news is that the whole main cast has been nominated for Oscars, and that is certainly a big draw for the film. I’ve always loved Streep and she does a terrific job here (including the adopting of a pretty mean Bronx accent), and manages to make a character who might seem wholly unlikeable understandable and even rather heroic, even if you don’t think she’s right. Hoffman, an equally brilliant actor, makes you wonder at every moment whether his outwardly jovial character might be hiding a dark secret. He shifts believably between cajoling and thundering when Sister Aloysius threatens to expose him (a dynamite scene). The little-known Viola Davis is heartbreaking and Amy Adams reliably good as the troubled young woman caught in the middle. I suspect that Shanley, with theater acting in mind, encouraged his cast, Hoffman and Streep in particular, to aim for the rafters, but the fireworks are certainly good ones.
Unfortunately, apart from getting those performances, Shanley is a much better writer than he is a director. The quiet and realistic feel of many simple scenes in the parish and convent were well-done. But a really experienced and visually-oriented director could have done a lot more with the story, say, for instance, Norman Jewison, who directed Shanley’s script for Moonstruck. There were attempts to hold the story together with meaningful images, but for the most part they just stuck out and called attention to themselves in the wrong way. The visual motifs of the wind and the light bulb constantly popping just came across and bizarre (not to mention the weird camera angles).
But there was one quite beautiful scene that really made the theme of faith and doubt resonate for me. It was the one where the sisters all come out of their rooms for morning prayer, and Sister James takes the half-blind old nun’s hand to lead her down the dark hall — only she really can’t see that well herself. This was in contrast to the previous scene where Sister James was sitting bathed in the morning sunlight in her room. Things are clear and bright and then they are not - and our leaders may find it as difficult to see as we do. But the flip side of doubt is faith, after all, and this scene seemed to encompass both. That is the image from the film that will last longest for me.
