Doubt

Doubt:  Used as a noun it means uncertainty; as a verb it means to question, to hesitate to believe, or to distrust.  All usages apply in this namesake film.

Two cinema greats, Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, engage in a complex war of wills that involves suspicion and the challenging and abuse of authority.  Doubt depicts how their individual belief systems, personalities and tenacity shape and filter their interaction with each other within the early '60s strict-but-changing confines of the fiercely hierarchical Roman Catholic Church.  A third character's related, but unimaginable, belief eventually implodes within this conflict.

Doubt contains brilliant dialogue, but austere sets, which reflect its stage-play origin and its occurrence within a Catholic school.  Streep plays the Catholic school principal, an authoritarian nun who suspects school-associated priest Hoffman of sexual abuse of a student.  Streep's character verbally engages the priest in continual thrust and parry, challenging his manner of student interaction and hoping to provoke him into self-incrimination.  Amy Adams plays a youthful, uncertain nun who is Streep's sounding board.

We who enjoy stage plays appreciate minimal settings and the power of dialogue, but the sparse and bleak surroundings in this film, while appropriate to the story, may present a challenge for some movie fans.

I have one criticism, and it concerns the portrayal of Streep's character as unrelentingly cold, self-righteous and arrogant.  For me, the film would have been more effective had it accorded her slightly more warmth and, yes, doubt.   However, nuns like this did exist, and I know this from long-ago personal experience. The playwright, John Patrick Shanley, adapted his play for the screen and directed the film, so I must assume the characterization was deliberate. 

Doubt is provocative, disturbing and challenging.  It will stay with you long after the ending, which I found satisfying but without mystery or ambiguity, unlike others who've seen it.

For those who enjoyed it, or have an interest in the mysteries of faith, I suggest another movie, Agnes of God, adapted for the screen by John Pielmeier from his play about a religious concept and a crime within a remote Quebec convent.  It features Jane Fonda as a court-appointed psychiatrist; Anne Bancroft as Mother Superior of the cloistered order; and Meg Tilly as Agnes, a devout young nun. 

The intense verbal sparring between Fonda's character and the Mother Superior is intellectually and religiously challenging.  It causes the logical, skeptical mind to question and wonder: "If we believe it happened once, why not again?"  I've pondered and searched for the conclusion the playwright intended us to reach, but it remains beyond my grasp, even after all these years and many repeat viewings.  Perhaps this was his intention.  Doubt and logic vs. faith.

Directed by Norman Jewison, Agnes of God is riveting.  Superb in acting, story-telling and cinematography, this 1985 film is honest, fair, provocative and powerful in its presentation of suspicion and doubt.

Chinese Box

Regrettably, movies like this aren't made anymore.

The opening credits played against a background of objects which have significance in the story, and just as they were ending, a beautiful lacquered box - a Chinese box - was shown slowly closing and then being slid, drawer-like, into a larger box which then closed, wooden-flap-after-wooden-flap.

According to Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, this film was released in 1997 and was a Japanese-French-USA production.

It features one of our greatest living actors, Jeremy Irons, in the leading role, together with a small cast who are unknown to me. Densely populated, sophisticated 1996-to-early-1997 Hong Kong is a central, omnipresent character.

This is a movie for intelligent, mature people for it engages both the heart and the mind.

It begins on New Year's Day, 1996, and ends on June 30, 1997, one day before Britain formally hands over sovereignty of their former colony of Hong Kong to China.

Jeremy Irons plays a British journalist living in Hong Kong, whose job has been to send political reports back to the English magazine which employs him. He's become distracted by, and immersed in the complex politics and culture of Hong Kong. To further complicate matters, he's fallen deeply in love with a Chinese woman who, years earlier, fled China to Hong Kong with a Chinese man who has become very successful and powerful in Hong Kong society.

These dynamics play out against several other simultaneous storylines, all set against the larger, momentous changes coming to Hong Kong and its citizens. The brilliance of this complex movie is that it's never confusing. Somehow all the concurrent stories are seamlessly woven together so the viewer is never confused. I marvelled at this, since the movie incorporates and portrays overlapping cultural, political and societal differences.

Given the current political dialogue about the conceptual differences between our western democracy and those of the Middle East and elsewhere, it's striking to hear the Jeremy Irons character discuss these very issues, and their looming impact on the impending surrender of Hong Kong to the Chinese, long before they came to current foreign policy prominence.

Already, even before they'd assumed control of Hong Kong, repressive China was revoking important democratic liberties which had existed under the departing British: the right of assembly and of protest. Some desperate Hong Kong citizens were committing public suicide in protest.

I was moved by the evolving tragedy of Hong Kong - citizens being handed over from freedom to tyranny as though they were possessions of government. Lives symbolized by a Chinese box ... lives being enveloped and contained, even as they fiercely sought love and meaningful life within their own circumstances.

It's a haunting film, one which I think would have pleased the late, great writer/actor/director Sydney Pollack, who said his greatest hope for a movie is that it make you think about it afterward and remember it.

I loved it.