Vielka's Guide to the Movies: Doubt

"Doubt" is the film adaptation of the play, looking at a priest in New York City and his questionable relationship with a black student, the school's first non-White student. The story takes place in 1964, after Kennedy's assassination and in the belly of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. The timing is key.

The priest starts by discussing how people are bonded by doubt, making reference to Kennedy. This triggers a nun, the principal, played by Meryl Streep, to have doubts about the priest's relationships with the students. She puts the other nuns on watch, and soon one on nun notices the supposed strange relationship with a student. When the principal confronts the priest about the relationship, he denies it, and the rest of the movie takes on a cat and mouse feel. In the end, the priest leaves the church and the audience never finds out if he did anything or what he did. It's nerve-racking, but whether or not the priest did anything is not the question; the question is why do we, as the audience, think he did.

We can automatically think about homosexuality, the church, and molestation on their own. But that is our contemporary setting and thinking. This is 1964 and the student is black. Although Phillip Seymour Hoffman gives a spectacular performance, my favorite of the movie is Viola Davis. She is in the movie all of seven minutes at the most; I'm sure any less she wouldn't even be considered a supporting actress. But those seven minutes draw you in like nothing else and she raises some of the most thought-provoking questions of the movie, as the student's mother. We find out that the student's father beats him. We find out that his father doesn't like him, we assume because the young man is gay. We find out that the young man had to switch schools because everyone at the public schools were tripping off him. And sadly, she brings up the question of if the priest is gay and doing something with her son, who cares, since at least it means her son will be treated nicely. I couldn't help but match her tears at that one.