Doubt

"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up."

                                                         - George Orwell

A Catholic man finishes seeking absolution and is about to leave the confessional when his Priest asks him to fill in as confessor for a few minutes while he goes and takes a shit.

“I don’t know Father. What sort of punishments should I hand out?”, he asks nervously.

“It’s very simple”, says the Priest, “Just use the chart on the wall. It lists the various sins and their appropriate atonements. You’ll do fine. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s a bit of an emergency.”

“Okay, Father”, the man agrees reluctantly.

He takes the Priest’s place in the confessional and waits.

The first person enters and admits to lying.

The man looks on the chart and says, “Say twenty Hail Marys.”

The next person confesses to feelings of pride and envy.

“That’ll be forty Hail Marys”, says the ersatz priest.

He smiles. He’s beginning to enjoy his new role.

Just then, a woman enters the booth and says, “Forgive me Father for I have sinned. I performed oral sex on a man in a bathroom.”

He looks on the chart but cannot find anything relating to fellatio. He begins to panic. He slips out of the confessional and grabs an altar boy.

Shaking the youth, he asks, “What do you get for a blowjob?”

“Father Tim usually gives me a Snickers!”, the boy replies enthusiastically.

I relay this humorous but crass joke to make two points:

1.) Stereotypes can blind us to truths and trick us into flawed judgments based on false absolutism.

AND

2.) I have a general distaste for Catholics.

Doubt writer/director John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize winning play from 2005, is given the full cinematic treatment here with astounding results.

The film is less about the standard treatise of child molestation (and the immoral protection offered to Priests) within the Catholic Church as it is about the winds of change that were whipping through the decaying infrastructure of the institution circa 1964.

The metaphoric struggle for the heart of the church is waged between a young, idealistic priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a martinetish nun (Meryl Streep) over the proper roles the clergy and sisters should play in developing young minds and providing for the future well being of Catholicism itself.

But the film is never what you expect it to be. And that is its refreshing allure.

It plays well with its characters- showing moral ambiguity, rigidity, fear, conviction, love, nobility, liberalism, persecution, perniciousness, pedagoguery, pettiness and a few other words with a “p” I can’t think of right now.

The important point is that it keeps you guessing despite your familiarity and preconceptions with the types of characters involved.

That is the film’s essential message. The constant sense of doubt in some of us or the lack of it in others- be it towards belief in god, suspicion of criminality or one‘s own righteousness in all matters.

And there is no better setting to air out this filthy psychic laundry than in the very institution which has brought so much unreasonableness, pain, suffering, lies and death to humankind.

I speak, of course, of the Republican Party Catholic Church.

And I don’t give a rat’s ass how many Oscars Meryl Streep has already won. She was robbed this year. Hands down the best performance by an actress I have seen in a good long time.

Perhaps, since Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction.

Kate Winslet, my ass.

Consummatum est.