Movie Review: Doubt
All through Doubt
The straight-forward plot set up is this: The head nun suspects a priest of molesting or is capable of molesting a student at their school.
But the world this movie builds around this catalyst is so realized and flowing. I can’t say the movie’s dilemmas, one of which is “Who to believe?,” are ever straight-forward.
I’ve thought about the possible choices over and over, and I still cannot say for certain what I would do. I’d like to think that I’d stay with the innocent-until-proven-guilty principle, but I’m sure that course of action would lead to many sleepless and doubt-filled nights.
There are a lot of other works (books, movies, stories, etc.) that play with moral or factual uncertainties. I don’t think I’ve encountered one that is as rich as Doubt though.
So much of your experience with this film is going to depend on what you take into it. Just some of the issues that are always swirling around in the background are:
- gender roles and power balances
- racial tensions and prejudices
- the place of religion in changing times
- our beliefs in privacy and the rule of law
- What is the greater good?
- What is the greater evil?
- the politics of socio-economic statuses
By the end of the movie, all this (and more) are in play during every scene.
The cast of the movie is incredible. The balance of this film could have gone very wrong with another set of presentations.
The one thing that I wish they did not do in the movie is the heavy-handed staging of the environmental and elemental parallels. They are so unnecessarily clunky that they pulled me out of the movie each time.
Luckily, that is not what I will remember about this movie.
The order of how I would vote:
Actress in a Leading Role
- Meryl Streep in Doubt
- Kate Winslet in The Reader
- Melissa Leo in Frozen River
- Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married
- Angelina Jolie in Changeling
Nice review! It sums up pretty well my overall impression of the film.
An additional nuance of ‘what we bring’ was my own Catholic upbringing. (I swear, Meryl Streep based her character on Sister Christine, my nemesis in grade school.) I never believed she could, or wanted to, make a fair assessment because of my experiences in this arena. My brother, on the other hand, has several acquaintences who were molested by priests. And he believed in the priest’s guilt from the onset. And we both can give evidence of our own suspicions. It’s a testament to the director and the acters that we leave the experience with our own doubts.
griot, I confess that tried my best to see these characters as just people and not religious figures. Otherwise, my own personal views about religion would play an overly (in my own opinion) role in my evaluations.
However, the tension between faith and proof is also such a huge part of religion. It’s another interesting aspect to this film.
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