Doubt

Yet another of the more recent movies I had a chance to DVR during one of the free preview weekends was Doubt. It's going to be on again tomorrow (April 9) at 3:35 PM on 5Star Max, with a couple of airings the following week on various channels within the Cinemax family.

The setting is the autumn of 1964, at St. Nicholas Catholic Church and the attached parochial school in the Bronx. Fr. Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the priest who is relatively new to the parish. But, a lot of the parishioners seem to like him, as do the students at the school, since some of the students are altar boys at Fr. Flynn's Masses and Fr. Flynn also teaches the boys' PE classes.

Meanwhile, it's the nuns who do the teaching at the school. Sr. Aloysius (Meryl Streep), a widow who only took vows after her husband was killed in action in Italy 20 years earlier, is the principal of the school, and she's a pretty strict headmistress, believing in the old traditions of the Church. Now, for those who aren't from a Roman Catholic background, it should be pointed out that 1964 was smack dab in the middle of the Second Vatican Council, which rather drastically changed Church practices, most notably the presentation of the Mass. This wasn't a cut-and-dried matter, and there were traditionals who were very displeased with what was going on.

Changes were also going on in American society in terms of race relations, and the school has its first black student in the Donald Miller, a nice enough kid who's one of the altar boys but is otherwise a bit shy. He's a student in the class of Sr. James (Amy Adams), a much younger teacher who likes both Sr. Aloysius and Fr. Flynn despite the fact that those two have profound differences.

One day, Donald is called from class down to the rectory to talk to Fr. Flynn. Sr. James only sees the aftermath of that conversation, and it gives her some questions that she brings up to Sr. Aloysious so that everything can be straightened out. First, Donald seems extra sullen on getting back to class. Also. Sr. James has seen Fr. Flynn putting a shirt into Donald's locker. Finally, Sr. James claims she smelled alcohol on Donald's breath. I don't know if the children would have gotten any of the sacramental wine at Mass, but it wouldn't have been much, and this meeting wasn't at Mass, so it's a much bigger problem.

After a meeting between the two nuns and Fr. Flynn, and further conversations with Fr. Flynn's superiors, the story everybody is going to stick with is that Donald decided to drink some of the Communion wine, and that Fr. Flynn tried to keep this from becoming public because he knew it would mean being forced to kick Donald out from being an altar boy, which is something he didn't want to do. That seems to satisfy Sr. James, but there's no way on God's green earth that it's going to satisfy Sr. Aloysius, who suspects something much more obvious to viewers in the period the movie was made, but might have been a bit less obvious to the people of 1964.

So it's with that in mind that Sr. Aloysius calls Donald's parents in order to talk with them and find out if they can shed any light on what might have happened. Donald's father isn't able to attend the meeting since it's during working hours, but Donald's mother (Viola Davis) is, and she has some rather surprising revelations for Sr. Aloysius. Mrs. Miller simply wants her son to be able to finish the school year because that means he'll have good prospects of getting into a good high school, which would mean the possibility of college, a huge thing for a family trying to deal with racism and climb the economic ladder.

The movie goes on for another 30 minutes or so, but my ending here isn't meant to gloss over the film's denouement or suggest that it overstays its welcome. Instead, the whole movie deals with doubt. What really happened in the rectory between Fr. Flynn and young Donald? Which of the characters handled things the best? The film lets the viewers judge for themselves, and that's an extremely intelligent thing for the script to do.

The movie is unsurprisingly helped out by extremely good acting, which you'd come to expect given the strong cast. At times, some of them have dialogue to deliver that sounds out of character, however, which is probably the one weakness of the movie. Streep, Hoffman, Adams, and Davis were all nominated for Oscars, although none of them won.

Even though Doubt is firmly rooted in the world of Catholicism, it's also a movie that touches on universal themes. Thanks to the excellent acting, Doubt is a movie that you should definitely see.