Review

Review Date: 28-December-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Doubt (2008)

Doubt is another example of a movie's trailer doing a disservice to the movie itself. Even after the first of my 67 viewings of the thing (did it have to be attached to every other film for months in advance?) I had my doubts as to whether I wanted to see Meryl Streep hamming it up like the punchline to a favorite joke of bitter Catholic school veterans. The trailer made her and her situation look as black-and-white as her nun's habit, which is antithetical to the point of the film. Doubt is in fact a terrifically acted, astute, and moving piece of work about one of the more complicated facts of life.

Streep's Sister Aloysius is certainly a pain in the ass. She is a true conservative in that she sees no reason why things should not go on as she thinks they always have (this in the 1960s — uh oh). When someone notes that she terrifies the students in the school where she is principal, she affirms "That's how it works." Kids should be sternly governed by adults, adults should be sternly governed by their superiors, and everybody should be sternly governed by God. But she is not a one-dimensional monster. Aided by Streep's knack for idiosyncrasy, she shows glimmers of humor, weakness, and caring, all of which pale to her chief trait of stubbornness.

Sister Aloysius' foil is a young nun (the only young one around) played by Amy Adams. She is a gentle creature who wants everyone to be happy and therefore deserves to remain so herself. Her peace of mind is shattered, however, when she suspects that their priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is pursuing a sexual relationship with a student, and when Sister Aloysius takes her suspicions and runs with them. The case is messy. Sister Aloysius already dislikes Father Flynn for his seemingly newfangled approach to dealing with children (he's friendly), and the boy in question is the only black student in school. The confrontations between accused and accuser are electric, but the real eye-opener is Sister Aloysius' meeting with the boy's mother (Viola Davis). Here is a conversation that anyone would expect to go only one way, and yet both Sister Aloysius and the audience are given a shocking lesson in how nothing is as clear-cut as it seems.

As writer/director John Patrick Shanley states through the opening sermon of Father Flynn, doubt is a unifying force in society. He goes further as the movie unfolds, arguing that doubt is a defining characteristic of humanity, the healthy root of the process of human existence. This is a truth that deserves repeating. The absence of doubt is what marks the mentally insane and the religious right and turns them into demons. Sister Aloysius' foolish certainty threatens to ruin a kind man's career, an innocent acolyte's purity, and even her own soul. You feel sorry for her as you do for them all, creatures caught up in the difficulty of not being God.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.