Certainty

I saw the movie version of Doubt yesterday. It was intensely moving, but more full of definite ideas than uncertainties.

The play -- and the movie -- had been billed as a cat and mouse game between the ferocious nun and the wily priest. I didn't see that story at all. Indeed the two of them seemed to agree on one huge issue, an issue neither of them could name. Sister Aloysius tormented herself and those around her with fear that the priest might do something, or have done something, ""evil." But what she really despised was not his actions but his intrinsic being -- and worse still his attempt to harness that being for good. Father Flynn was aware of his intrinsic being, and sought to channel it in the service of selfless love. But that fell short of total repression, and they both knew it. The crux of the drama came in the confrontation scene in the nun's office. The look on the priest's face as he realized that nothing he could ever do would make him less loathsome in her eyes revealed that he knew her eyes were the eyes of his God. And he loathed himself as completely as God and the nun did.

The unnamed horror is homosexuality. Father Flynn was gay. Sister Aloysius saw that, and saw that instead of effacing all traces of his homosexuality Father Flynn allowed it to flower as nurturing. I have no doubt that Father Flynn's relationship with Donald, the black boy whose "purity" Sister Aloysius seeks to defend (Sister Aloysius has a consistency problem here; she treats all the kids as depraved but romanticizes them as sexually innocent) did not include actual sex. From the viewpoint of church teaching the relationship was just as bad: Father Flynn was seeking to make Donald feel good about himself, in effect to give him permission to be gay. Not to act out his desires, just to acknowledge his nature. That would not be acceptible to Sister A, any more than it would to Pope Benedict. And here I find myself both pitying and angry with Father Flynn, though I do not blame him for living within the confines of his time and culture. He sought to stay in a church that invalidated his being, a church with a history of abuse and even murder foisted upon such as he. He knew of no other way than to make himself as acceptible to God as he could manage -- and show others how to do the same. Better than beating the boy, as Donald's father did, but far short of spiritual liberation. Alas for a world of fear and judgment!

Donald's mother is beautifully realized, a woman who loves her child and is willing to accept almost anything if it brings love and a measure of peace. I am not sure that she could have existed with that worldview in 1964, but it is nice to think that anyone could focus so clearly on love without judgment.

Sister Aloysius is an awesome creation, an almost perfect horror. Her tics and looks, her spying and lying -- she justifies her actions as stepping away from God in the greater service of good, just like Dick Cheney -- all project an aura of creepy grandeur, Catherine de' Medici as grade school principal. Indeed, I wonder if the doubt here might not be less about Father Flynn's likely gayness than about Sister Aloysius's so-deeply-repressed-that-it-cannot-even-surface-as-an-issue lesbianism. She is certainly a virago, a woman outraged by her powerlessness in a church run exclusively by men, who revenges herself by using covert action to achieve her goals. Even she has a humanizing (or at least justifying) moment: she tells novice Sister James to put up the picture of the Pope, and when Sister James objects that the photo is of the wrong Pope she says that it can be used as a mirror so that Sister James can see what the pupils are doing as she writes on the board. Simple and effective classroom management. Poor Sister James goes from innocent to outraged, caught between her belief in goodness, her obvious crush on Father Flynn, and her awe of Sister Aloysius. The confrontation of the two nuns at the end is unfortunately the weakest scene in the movie. Sister James lacks the force to bring Sister Aloysius to any sort of spiritual crisis, and Sister Aloysius has been too thoroughly encased in stone to crack as horrifically as she does. I could see her raging against Father Flynn's promotion but not yielding to her doubts.

Meryl Steep, our Lady of the Accents, has been taken to task in some reviews for the bizarre diapaison she employs in this role, but I am here to tell you that, as a friend and listener of several Bronx-born and -raised Italian Americans, she sounds utterly real.

Worth seeing.