When Good Religions Go Bad - 'Doubt' Review
In a sermon that opens the movie, Father Brendan Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) tells us, "Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty." While we in the audience ponder over the surprising accuracy of this statement, a Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) begins to suspect that Father Flynn's sermon meant that he himself has something that he needs to confess. What it is she has no idea and doesn't care to guess, but she means to find out.Much of the beginning of the movie is dedicated to introducing us to the intensely Catholic world in which it takes place. Father Flynn is a progressive priest. He understands that the world is changing and that perhaps the church should change with it in many ways, rather than forcing a puritanical obedience, banning ballpoint pens from Catholic schools and forbidding the performance of something like Frosty the Snowman at the Christmas pageant.
Sister Aloysius, on the other hand, believes that Frosty the Snowman propagates a pagan belief in magic. She feels that the images are disturbing and the message heretical and that it ought to be banned from the airwaves. Oh, and she also believes that something as simple as allowing ballpoint pens into the school will start them on a slippery slope to damnation.
"Every choice today will have its consequence tomorrow. Mark my words!"
I sure hope she's wrong, by the way. You should see how many ballpoint pens I have in my apartment...
The important thing is that the priests at St. Nicholas, a Catholic school in 1964 Brooklyn, operate in a completely different world from the nuns. Father Flynn is that highest ranking priest, and he makes fat jokes about some of the church members when he and the other priests are in private. The nuns, however, headed up by Sister Aloysius, are deeply serious and do not allow the slightest digression from the most devout formality.As the characters develop, there is a tendency to gravitate toward Father Flynn, who seems to be just as devoted to his religion as Sister Aloysius, but who understands that forcing purely puritanical beliefs on the kids at the school is not the best route. When she states her attitude about Frosty the Snowman, he jots down a sudden idea for a sermon on the topic of intolerance. More importantly, there was a political change taking place at the time, and the first effect felt at St. Nicholas was the acceptance of the school's first black student, a Donald Miller.
There is an interesting scene where he is coaching basketball and in the middle of practice he sits the kids down and chastises them for having dirty fingernails. His own fingernails are overly long, he admits, but they're clean, and that's the most important thing. Unlike Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn believes that cleanliness is next to godliness. Sister Aloysius leans more toward a belief that flawlessness is next to godliness, and that cleanliness is merely a portion of flawlessness.
Very soon a series of small but slightly questionable occurrences lead to a power struggle between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn. A younger nun, Sister James, mentions the occurrences to Sister Aloysius, believing that total honesty can only lead to the best conclusion of anything that might be going on.Sister James' honesty leads to Sister Aloysius's suspicion that Father Flynn has been having an inappropriate relationship with Donald Miller. The movie presents Catholic school life as being as dry and windblown as a cattle skull in the Arizona desert, but it isn't until we learn how Sister Aloysius feels about this Donald Miller that it really becomes clear how deeply she adheres to an ancient Catholic belief system, and how incompatible her beliefs are with modern society.
Friends I know who have attended Catholic school have all given me descriptions of the experience that are wildly different from that presented in movies, which only seem to have anything to say about the Catholic church when corrupt priests are involved. I have been told that the nuns tend to be nothing but nurturing and well-meaning, and that while the principals (like Sister Aloysius) tend to be genuinely frightening, it is never so much because they do terrible things, but only because they exude the power to do terrible things. Sister Aloysius understands the hierarchy in which she operates, and she understands its importance. When the young Sister James, in an emotional scene, berates her for for making all of the students fear her, she is completely unmoved.
"Of course," she says. "That's how it works."There is a scene in the movie where Sister Aloysius and Sister James confront Father Flynn with their questions and concerns, and the movie changes completely. Both sides are sure that they have an iron-clad case, and when confronted with each other, they both collapse. The whole process is interesting because, in this puritanical world they handle it in a completely different way than how most other people would handle it.
They are much more open than most people would be about such a sensitive subject, but most importantly, Sister Aloysius makes up her mind about Father Flynn's guilt before she has a shred of evidence. Importantly, however, she understands her lack of evidence, but she is absolutely certain that she is right, and her faith in that certainty is enough for her.
But the movie is not about corrupt priests, believe it or not. Doubt walks a fine line, particularly with a modern audience, in not offending the Catholic audience by portraying a priest who is potentially abusing an altar boy, but it's not about that at all. It's about the paralyzing dichotomy created by the unwanted and often willfully ignored presence of something as simple but powerful as doubt in a world of certainty. The minute Sister Aloysius hears that Father Flynn summoned an altar boy alone to the rectory, her mind is made up of his guilt, and she never cares to see him proven innocent or guilty, only to convince enough people to share her belief to get him ejected from the priesthood.
One of the film's most important messages is the incongruous nature of certainty and compassion. Faith in the righteous leaves no room for compassion for the imperfect, even if the imperfect have committed no crime other than the color of their skin or, yes, their sexuality. Doubt tells us that a person's sexuality is God-given, which should start a new firestorm of cotroversy by itself.But that's the whole point. There is so little about which we can be absolutely certain. If you have read much of any philosophical discourse, there's really nothing that we can know with absolute certainty. It is important and telling the there is never any certain conclusion given to the main conflict in the movie, only the destruction of the most powerful walls of certainty, leaving only the lingering presence of doubt which was there all along, quietly waiting for all other psychological constructs to break down.
There is an interesting and surprising incongruity between the simplicity of the film, the world in which the story takes place, and the depth of the issues that it approaches. This isn't about abusive priests or religious extremism, it's about the clashing of two very basic belief systems, neither of which is really better or worse than the other. I am reminded of the recent film Traitor, which also presented a myriad of theological questions and uncertainties, but which was smart enough not to presume to try to answer them.
We all have different belief systems, we all have different certainties and uncertainties and doubts and systems of faith that get us through our lives. Doubt deals with all of these issues and for once tries to convince us that there are none of us who are really right or wrong, at least none who can lable anyone else right or wrong, but when one person takes it upon themselves to allow their own certainty, their own faith, to affect someone else's life, only then does faith become a problem.
Sister Aloysius illustrates this phenomenon in one of the simplest and yet most powerful lines in the movie -
"In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God."
