Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Religious Music and Entertainment
Doubt the Movie

Doubt the Movie

Last updated on: December 12, 2008 at 11:53 am by Sister Rose

Doubt the Movie 2008-12-12T11:53:53-07:00 Sister Rose

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

doubtposter08

It is December, 1964. At St Nicholas Parish in the Bronx, Fr. Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) celebrates Mass. He is preaching about “doubt” and Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the mother superior of the Sisters of Charity and principal of the school is in the congregation. She is not pleased with Fr. Flynn’s sermon.

Sister James (Amy Adams) is a young sister in her first year of teaching. One of her students, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster) is the only African-American student in the school. Fr. Flynn takes an interest in him. Donald is also an altar boy.

One day, Fr. Flynn calls Donald to the rectory. The boy acts strangely when he returns to class and Sr. James reports this to Sr. Aloysius. “And so it begins,” she says. She puts Fr. Flynn on notice that she is going to expose him. He is shocked at her insinuation that he has molested the boy. He demands evidence, but all she has is her “certainty.”

Sr. James is a young, inexperienced religious caught in the middle of a vortex: between Sr. Aloysius claims to certainty, the child, seeing Fr. Flynn sneak a piece of clothing into Donald’s locker, and her own insecurity and lack of life and faith experience.

doubt-streep_l

Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in DOUBT

Sr. Aloysius tries to speak with Donald’s mother (Viola Davis). She wants her son to stay at St. Nicholas until the end of the year so he will be safe from public school bullies; she admits to being abused by her husband. She also demands proof.

I went to a screening of Doubt a few weeks ago. Afterwards, the writer/director John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck), Meryl Streep, Hoffman, Adams and Viola Davis came onstage and spoke about the film.

The acting in the film is superb; Shanley, Streep, Hoffman, Adams, and Davis, will all attract award notice

Shanley spoke about “doubt” in broad terms; the certainty of the faith of his childhood, and the place of doubt in human experience. He alluded to the certainty of these past several years in the U.S. (I took it to be a political reference; my companion at the screening disagreed; I was happy to read in Shanley’s introduction to the play that was just published, that he meant certainty in all aspects of life) and that doubt and the questions it prompts, can be a sign, the beginning, of wisdom.

Shanley, who adapted his play for the screen, has given us a parable rooted in the recent clergy abuse scandal that broke in 2002. The film is definitely a statement against pedophilia. He also references domestic abuse and the unspeakable lengths that people go to so they can survive.

In the film Doubt no evidence is ever offered that would condemn Fr. Flynn, though his responses read like a checklist of the behavior of a pedophile (giving gifts, special attention to a child, isolating the child, and that piece of clothing…, etc.) No one even asks the child if something happened, though Fr. Flynn gives a plausible, but not necessarily ironclad, explanation. Is his confusion real? Is he guilty? Only you can decide, and maybe not even then.

The Sister James character, Shanley told the audience, is based on his own 1st grade teacher – Sister Margaret McEntee, SC. Early on when Doubt was on the stage, he was surprised to learn was still living. The film is dedicated to her (as is the published version of the play) and he hired her to be a consultant to the film. I think she has done a wonderful job of presenting religious life just as Vatican II was ending. I entered my community in 1967, and everything in the film about convent life, from the small kindnesses to the hubris, is credible. After all, religious life is a microcosm of humanity, women struggling to be who we say we are: disciples of Jesus.

Is Fr. Flynn guilty? He could be; but he might not be. Perhaps he is just imprudent or dumb. Sr. Aloysius’ decision to go contrary to God to find the truth, as she explains to Sr. James, is morally troubling.

Sr. Aloysius accuses Sr. James as wanting the security of simplicity again, like she had before this episode; yet I think Sr. Aloysius is speaking to herself, and to everyone who has ever doubted.

The atmosphere of the film is cold and stark: December in a frozen, urban landscape is bleak. The emotional, rational, spiritual state of doubt can be chilly: a dark night of the soul, the revelation or realization of doubt, that makes us take action and ask questions, that challenges the comfort of our certainty, is a cold, and at times, lonely journey.

As the writings of St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of the Child Jesus, and Mother Teresa attest, doubt happens, and however painful, can be a source of honesty and ultimately, spiritual growth.

Shanley uses the suspicion of very real clerical pedophilia as a way to explore the certainty of faith. As such, Doubt is a powerful film that will evoke questions and, hopefully, launch a thousand conversations about things that matter.

Please see www.usccb.org for the review of the USCCB’s Office for Film and Broadcast.

For a copy of the Pultizer Prize for Drama play, go to: http://www.amazon.com/Doubt-movie-tie-Patrick-Shanley/dp/1559363479/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229034376&sr=8-1

41jgxcpbbxl_ss500_1

The following is the SIGNIS STATEMENT about the film Doubt, written by Rev. Peter Malone, MSH, who heads the film desk for SIGNIS. SIGNIS is the Vatican-approved international Catholic organization for communication: www.signis.net

signis_new

SIGNIS STATEMENT

2nd December 2008

THE CHURCH IN TRANSITION: DOUBT

Doubt is a film of strong Catholic interest.

It can be viewed in the light of the current Church experience of sexual abuse by clergy. However, this is not the central issue of the film. Doubt is a film about Church structures, hierarchy, the exercise of power and the primacy of discipline and order.

Set in the autumn of 1964 in the Bronx, New York, the film focuses on the suspicions of the primary school principal, Sister Aloysius, that the local priest and chaplain to the school, Fr Flynn, is taking an unhealthy interest in one of the students, aged twelve. There are some suggestions, several ambiguous clues, about what might have happened but the actual events remain unclear as the priest defends himself against the nun’ strong intuition against him and the nun discusses the problem with the boy’s mother. As the title of the film indicates, the drama leaves the truth unclear because it is the stances of the two characters in conflict, especially the determined nun and the truth struggle, the power struggle, the conscience struggle, that is the point of the film.

John Patrick Shanley (Oscar for the screenplay for Moonstruck and a prolific playwright) has adapted and opened out his Pulitzer-prize winning play for the screen and directed it himself. Shanley has indicated that he is not so much concerned with the issue of clerical abuse of children as of pitting two characters against each other to highlight the uncertainties of certainty and the nature of doubt. The drama is all the more powerful because of its naturalistic atmosphere, recreating the period and the life of the school, the convent and the rectory, and because of the powerful performances by Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Fr Flynn. Amy Adams gives contrasting support as the gentle and somewhat naïve Sister James who teaches the children. Viola Davis is the mother of the boy.

It can be noted that the nun on whom the film’s Sister James was based and who taught Shanley at school in the Bronx has acted as a technical adviser. The film, by contrast with so many others, represents the details of Church and liturgical life accurately – although there is a breviary in English, which was not the case in 1964, the children sing the Taize Ubi Caritas at Mass although it was composed later and Sister James is allowed to go to visit her sick brother which most nuns were not permitted to do at that time. However, the film has a Catholic atmosphere which, while it might baffle audiences who were not there at the time, will ring true and bring back many memories to Catholics who lived through this strict period.

As with most organisations by the beginning of the 1960s, secular or religious, the Catholic Church was hierarchically structured. Everyone knew their place, whether they liked it or not. A pervading Gospel spirit of charity and service pervaded the Church but it was often exercised in a way that seemed harsh and demanding, especially by those who saw their authority being backed by a ‘grace of state’. Many of those who left the Church in this era give anecdotes of the treatment they received from priests and nuns as reasons for their departure, even of their loss of faith. When John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council in January 1959 and it opened on October 11th 1962, in his phrase, windows were opened, and change began to sweep through the Church. This coincided with the changes, especially in Western society during the 1960s and the widespread protests symbolised by the Vietnam War and the hippy movement. In fact, this was also the decade of enormous changes in Africa and the moves for independence. Independence was a key word of the 1960s.

This is the theme that Doubt takes up.

Sister Aloysius

Sister Aloysius, who, we learn, is a widow, is a strong-minded superior of the strict, intervening school of religious life. She sees herself as an authority figure and what she says goes. This was the spirituality of God’s will spoken through the Superior – though, in retrospect, this often seems more the whim of the superior. She believes in discipline and she does not expect to be liked. She trusts her intuitions and assumes that they are correct. She does show some consideration to the health and mental states of the older sisters and has moments of kindness to Sister James but, the kind of Church and religious life she has inherited mean that she is constantly on the alert, wants proper order everywhere and sees herself in the chain of hierarchical authority that goes up via parish priest, bishop, to Rome and to the Holy Father.

Shanley is giving us an image of this kind of nun and her ethos and religious motivations. At its best and worst this can be seen in Fred Zinneman’s The Nun’s Story (filmed in 1958 while Pius XII was still alive and the assumption was that this is how religious life would be forever) but released in 1959 after John XXIII had called the Council which asked for renewal in all religious orders. Sister Aloysius is experiencing the first signs of a more transparent church, a church where a more adult obedience and discernment would replace any blind obedience and any childish exercise of power. A year after the story of Doubt, the Council would issue its Constitution on the Church which would respect hierarchy but interpret the life of the Church as that of the People of God, with the principles of subsidiarity and shared responsibility.

Fr Flynn

This kind of Church is what Fr Flynn is foreshadowing in the film. It is not as if there were not friendly priests – Fr Bing Crosby received frowns from Fr Barry Fitzgerald in the 1944 Oscar-winner, Going My Way, for being too open and relaxed – and got into some trouble with the school principal, Ingrid Bergman, in The Bells of St Mary’s, both films being interesting companion pieces to Doubt.

At the opening of the film, Fr Flynn gives a sermon on experiencing doubts. This cuts no ice with Sister Aloysius. Fr Flynn is already on her hit list because of his friendliness towards the children in the school. He coaches basketball. He talks with the children and affirms them. This kind of pastoral outreach was about to be encouraged by the Council’s document on priesthood.

The film also offers a contrast between the silent, rather ascetical meals in the convent with the jovial conversation and joking at the priests’ parish table.

Certainties and doubts

The confrontations between Sister Aloysius and Fr Flynn become quite desperate for Fr Flynn when he realises that the nun is so certain and dominating and has taken investigations into her own hands rather than respecting him as a person let alone a priest. We see the conflict between the old authoritarian style and the new, more personable style of interactions. While Shanley himself states that he has some sympathy for the old ways, rituals, silence and devotion, his drama clearly shows the inadequacy of the authoritarian hierarchical model of Church in dealing with human relationships. Something had to change. And it did.

The sisters in the film are the Sisters of Charity founded in the 19th century by Elizabeth Bayley Seton,canonised a saint in 1975, and they are still wearing her dress/habit and bonnet. Within the decade, that would change, sisters wearing a less formal habit or ordinary clothes with an emblem indicating their religious order. Community life would be less rigid as would the relationships between the sisters. There would be different relationships between the parish clergy and the sisters would worked in the parish.

Doubt offers an opportunity to look at the two models of Church and to assess their strengths and weaknesses, especially in the light of subsequent events and the nature and life of the Church at the present day.

The film wants to create doubts in the minds and emotions of the audience by contrasting the two styles of pastoral outreach, Sister Aloysius as stern, Fr Flynn as amiable. As regards the doubts about Fr Flynn’s behaviour, contrasting clues are offered: Fr Flynn’s manner and friendliness with the boys, his singling out Donald for attention, Donald’s drinking the altar wine in the sacristy and Sister Aloysius’ conclusion that Fr Flynn had given it to him, Fr Flynn’s calling Donald out of class to the rectory and Sister James’ wariness about this. On the other hand, Fr Flynn has explanations of Donald being the only African American boy in the school and the antipathy and bullying he received and wanting him to remain as an altar boy despite the offence which required his being dismissed as a server, his drinking the wine because of his father’s beating him because he suspected his homosexual orientation. This is complicated by the conversation between Sister Aloysius and Donald’s mother whose sole concern, irrespective of what Fr Flynn might have done or not done and her husband’s violent treatment of Donald, is that Donald remain in the school for the next sixth months so that he will graduate and have the opportunity to go to a good high school.

Shanley’s images of Sister Aloysius at the end indicates that he believes we should all have doubts and not take the moral high ground of untested certainties.

[There are several films that take up this transition in the Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council. At the time, there were some films about nuns handling the changes: The Trouble With Angels, Where Angels Go… Trouble Follows and Change of Habit. The small-budget film, Impure Thoughts (1981) has some very funny scenes of reminiscences about sisters and prriests in a parish school of 1961; Heaven Help us (1985)is set in a Franciscan boy’s high school in 1965. This was the year Paul VI went to New York and addressed the United Nations – an event which is part of the background of Polanski’s film of Rosemary’s Baby. For a stronger focus on the changes for nuns at the time, the Australian mini-series, Brides of Christ, is probably the best. A telemovie, starring Kate Mulgrew as Mother Seton, about the founding of the Sisters of Charity is A Time for Miracles (1980).]

Film Reviews

religion

Doubt

Doubt the Film Catholic reviews

Previous Post

December 2, 2008

1 vs 100 on NBC Memories

Next Post

December 13, 2008 The Power of Film from IMDB

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Adolescent Adult Faith Formation Advertising Analysis Animals Pets Animation art Authors Awards best pope pictures Bible BioPic Blogs Book Reviews Books books into film Catechesis Catholic comedy Catholic Social Teaching Catholic Social Teaching (CST) Catholics in Media Christian genre Christmas movies Church and cinema Cognitive science Comedy Comics Commerntary Communication Cooking Courses Critics and Criticism Dance Daughters of St Paul news Devil movies digital games Documentary Drama Economics Ecumenical Education and Technology Education: Access and Empowerment electronic Environment Events Exorcism movies Eye on Entertainment Faith and film Faith formation Fantasy Film Essays Film Festivals Film History Film Retreat Film Reviews Film TV about Ultra Orthodox Jews Food General Grace Historical thriller History Horror How to Images INNdustry with Sister Rose Internet Interviews jesuits Kindness Lectures Lent Life Lists Literature media Media analysis Media Literacy/Media Mindfulness Music Musical National Catholic Reporter New on DVD Non-violence Nonviolence Obituaries On Faith and Media Oscars Ovis et bovis et universe pecore Parenting Pastoral Communication Pastoral communications Pauline Books & Media pax christi PCMS & Online Courses Peace Philosophy Photos Planning for Communication pope francis Popular Culture Radio RCL Benziger reality tv Reflections on life and grace religion Religious Lif Research Resources Retreat Rosary Sacraments Science and faith Social justice Social Media spirituality Spirituality and Media Sports Sr Rose Faith and Media Sr. Rose movies St. Anthony Messenger Stage & Theater stereotypes story Streaming series Survey Television the bible the bible movie The INNdustry with Sr Rose the voice Theater Themes of Catholic Social Teaching theologizing violence Theology theology of violence TV reviews and notes Uncategorized Video Video games Violence VR Games War War films Women World Film Young Adult YouTube

Select a Month September 2025 March 2025 December 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 December 2022 October 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 May 2021 April 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 December 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 January 2019 December 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

How many years between David's reign and the Babylonian exile?

Select your answer to see how you score.

450 years 300 years 500 years 400 years