Doubt

When I pulled up in front of the Tyngsboro multiplex, it was still the flush of the bright sunny morning. I felt as if I were arriving at work. But heck, I wasn't going to see Tom Cruise or Will Smith or Adam Sandler. going to see a good movie now, with Philip Seymour Fucking Hoffman! Could it get any better than this?

Doubt---here's a movie that speaks my language. The setting is fall of 1964, in the wake of the Ur moment of American change---the Kennedy assassination, an event that is explicitly invoked by Hoffman's priest character in the opening minutes. Moreover, it is the very hinge of the changeover from the classical to postmodern in our culture, during the critical two-year span 1964-65 when broadcast color television debuted (see Chernus).

The pivotal nature of this moment is embodied in the lead character, a principal of a Catholic school in the Bronx, a hardened nun played by Meryl Streep. She is intolerant and mean, but perhaps with a purpose. She sees the world disintegrating around her and unshamedly fights to sustain it, even though she knows it makes her despised by her pupils. I can't root against her. She hates ballpoint pens, because they force the writer to press down on the paper like monkeys. As someone who can write only with Sanford Uniball 0.2mm Ultrafine pens, I completely understand this position. She knows that the easiness of technology will turn us into postmodern subhumans. It's a losing battle, and her soul burns from the torment of it.

Yet at the same time she is actually what she hates. The basic tenet of the classical paradigm is the Code of Honor. It not only a personal, individual code, but it is also an outward societal agreement. In the first respect, it governs what an individual will or won't do. In the second societal sense, it commands that we accept others (adults, at least) as honorable to their word unless proven otherwise. Her tragedy arises from the fact that she has lost sight of this, even as she claims to uphold the old order. She applies the prisonlike rules of the schoolroom to her fellow adults. She accuses without evidence, based solely on suspicion. The new era has truly begun, one in which we lost our collective presumption of adult honor.

But is the leap worth it? Do we deserve this loss? Is there something horrible going on which demands that we toss aside evidence and act upon suspicion alone? Which is the greater good, especially when the welfare of children are at stake? These are the 1964 questions that the movie raises, and which refuses to answer, because there is no easy answer, unless you are firmly committed to one camp or another.

This is not about how "truth is relative" or any postmodern crap like that. It's about (in part) the appropriate way in which we determine truth, and how that can depend on the character of the era in which we find ourselves.

I loved this movie. At an hour and forty-five minutes, it absolutely flew by. I had read the play by John Patrick Shanley last week, and was pleased to see how well he had expanded his own creation as director of the film, filling out the minor characters which are only mentioned in the play, but which do not appear. It was a both a perfect period piece of the mid-1960s, and a movie about the present day.

The only anachronistic touch seemed to be the utter rapidity with which Streep's character concludes that Seymour's priest has been sexually abusing the black child Donald. In the 1960s, such "shameful" ideas would probably been arrived at slightly more reluctantly, which perhaps was part of the problem, given what we know now. This treatment differed from the play script, and seemed more 2004 than 1964, but it is forgivable considering the need to communicate to contemporary audiences in such a short running time (On a side note, consider watching Samuel Fuller's brutal masterpiece The Naked Kiss, ironically from October 1964, for one of the few frank discussions of this topic from that era).

The acting was first rate. Hoffman is a national treasure, and Streep---my God!---gave perhaps her best performance of her career (although I haven't seen all her movies, so I can't say). Amy Adams is one of my favorites, being that she's a Colorado girl who got her start acting in high school there. Among the principals, she has perhaps the easiest role of the film, but does everything she is supposed to do. Viola Davis, as the boy's mother, has landed a well-deserved Golden Globe nomination.