Wednesday, January 14, 2009

A Comment on the Movie Doubt

SPOILERS about ending included.

Rose went to see Doubt yesterday and came back with a positive review. She said the movie was fine, criticized the director for such obvious work of screen angles to make his point ("We get it," she said, "There is doubt. You can stop canting [slanting] the angles so much. Sheez.") Well, I never knew that was the point of some "canted angles" so moving on.

My question was about the story line since that is a movie I don't feel interested in seeing. Rose was surprised and quite pleased that the very traditional nun was the one who was right instead of going with the easy ending of criticizing her and letting the pleasant priest be right. She said that there was very little doubt left via many small clues by the end of the movie that the priest had been a child molester, that his mother allowed it, and that the only one standing up for the kid was the unlikable, strict nun played by Meryl Streep. In fact, the indictment against the Church for moving him and making him pastor of another parish was made all the stronger for her reaction.

This brings to mind something that a friend of mine said once (maybe it was Marcia?), that the decrease in nuns was among the many factors that helped create the conditions of the Church's sex scandal. "They kept an eye on the priests," she said. "Nothing got by them."

Turning over the plot of that movie it sounds as if the screenwriter (who I believe was also the director) knew that well.

2 comments:

  1. It was rather interesting for me to read this blog. Thanx for it. I like such topics and anything connected to them. I definitely want to read a bit more soon.

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  2. I doubt the decrease in nuns had much to do with it. This hellacious behavior was going on while schools were fully staffed with nuns. They were all part of the same prison of abuse. I went to a Catholic grammar school - and not so heavy-handed, either. If you even had the guts to say anything to one of the nuns about this kind of behavior, you would have been told to shut your mouth and been treated like a leper thereafter - by the NUNS.

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