Movies I’m Watching：Doubt

I think i read the play a number of years ago … it was good but didn’t leave a huge impression on me. The movie retains that “theatrical” feeling in the way that it’s staged, in the particular rhythm of the shots and the plot as well as in the very even and articulate dialogue. I didn’t mind this too much, but it certainly was quite noticeable. The best thing about this movie were the performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep: it wasn’t the best work that either has done, but you can at least say watching said performances, that these are consummate professionals at work, and are among the best working in Hollywood today.

As for the philosophical business regarding doubt, faith, social progress, etc. Well, that was fairly boilerplate, in a way. The debate is materialized or realized in the conflict between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius. He smokes, drinks, is socially progressive, wants to put a more human face on the church. The sister is all about discipline, authority, and puritanic rigor in thought and action–and they don’t really like each other. Of course, she wins, in a manner of speaking, because she is able to squeeze all vestiges of doubt from her when necessary. Her convictions seem unshakeable, whereas the Father, despite being a man of God, knows all too well, the wages of sin. He knows human foibles, he knows the weakness of human nature. And thus we are lead to believe that he might have, in fact, taken advantage of a young boy in that way that Catholics priests are wont to do.

However, in the end, he has made his peace with doubt and sin. He knows the limits of human striving, and knows that god doesn’t expect humans to be perfect and he is dubious of the sister’s demands of her charges and peers, because he knows that to be her is to stunt something vital at the heart of oneself. And that’s not realistic for the clergy, much less for their parishioners.

In the end, Sister Aloysius admits that she suffers from doubts–such doubts. After seeing a movie where she seems utterly in control for 99% of her screen time, it’s a bit hard to believe that she would start confessing her doubts out of the blue, much less to Sister James, who she was always so supercilious and patronizing towards–but that’s what she does, and that’s the end of the movie.

Why does she doubt? Because Father Flynn “got away with it” and even ended up with a better assignment than he had with them? Or because after her husband died in the war, she repressed something vital in her, and became a dessicated version of herself–a defense against the more than fair share of sadness, grief, and darkness that she had experienced while still relatively young?

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