Beyond Doubt

“I will do what needs to be done, though I’m damned to Hell! You should understand that, or you will mistake me.“

When I was 10 in the early 60s I was preparing for the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation. I never attended a Catholic school, so I was prepared on evenings and weekends by lay women at the local Catholic elementary school. These women were kind and gentle souls who treated their charges with compassion - we were ‘outside’ the fold you see, 2nd-class Catholics. During my lessons I crossed paths with some of the nuns from the school, and they were always sour and severe in their fearsome dark habits. In his wisdom, the parish priest decreed that to qualify for the sacrament, the other kids and I had to take a leave of absence from our public school and spend a week in a Catholic school class. On my first day I was ‘welcomed’ by the nun principal and treated so harshly and with such contempt that at the first opportunity, I made a b-line for the school gate and wandered the streets until the afternoon, when I returned home to face the music. Thankfully, my parents let me return to my public school the next day. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, set in 1964, a nun principal in her sixties, Sister Aloysius, played exquisitely by Meryl Streep, is a harsh and a strict disciplinarian at a Catholic elementary school in the Bronx. She is roundly feared by students and held in awe by the other nuns. The parish priest, Father Brendan (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is younger, wants a more a liberal welcoming parish, and his sermons are impressive and unusually hold his Mass-goer’s attention. A young idealistic nun, Sister James (Amy Adams) becomes suspicious of the nature of the priest’s relationship with an alter-boy, the school’s only black student, and informs Sister Aloysius. The boy’s mother (Viola Davis) when told by Sister Aloysius of the suspicion shockingly expresses higher priorities for her child. After an 18 year hiatus, Shanley directing his second feature, based on his play and screenplay, has fashioned a powerful and ambivalent story. He may not win any kudos for directorial flair, but his direction while subdued is assured. He leaves the protagonists to develop the story. While making effective use of close-ups and low-angle shots to accentuate the melodrama, only his use of off-horizontal takes is a mis-step. He deftly takes the scene with the boy’s mother and Sister Aloysius out of the principal’s office to neutral territory on sombre autumnal streets. Shanley’s use of rain, wind, and snow to underline the drama is elegant, and his script is powerful and to the point, and not at all stagy. The audience is free to enter a realistically rendered cinematic place. Meryl Streep dominates in a bravura performance, the supporting cast is superb, with nuanced portrayals all-round. Though constrained by a full nun’s habit, Streep captures the disciplined yet rebellious and compassionate woman in all her contradictions and yes, softness. (I now wonder whether there was any softness in the nun’s of my childhood.) Sister Aloysius is, as she herself says, the ‘protector’ of the children in her care, and her every action is taken for this end - she is hard, that’s her ‘job’. You admire her for her resilience and commitment. She battles with intelligence and wit against hypocrisy, moral relativism, hierarchy, patriarchy, and ultimately, doubt. If we adopted the rules of judicial evidence, of being persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt, how many believers would maintain a religious faith? In matters of individual faith, it is the individual who decides, but in situations where terrible harm may be occurring, and we have only circumstantial evidence, is the burden of proof absolutely necessary? Is an instinctual knowledge of a truth to hold sway over vehement denial and no corroboration? These are vexed questions, and this timely and serious film confronts them head-on. Not to be missed.