I've been wanting to try my hand at writing short film reviews to post on Letterboxd, as a personal challenge; it's easy enough to comment upon movies on social media in an informal way, but writing a definite review or critique was surprisingly intimidating. but finally I took the chance, and wrote this ex tempore for Letterboxd. it's about John Patrick Shanley's 2008 film Doubt.
cw: Catholicism, CSA mentions
I suppose it is possible still to be in doubt, by the end of the 2008 film "Doubt", whether Father Brendan O'Flynn—the priest of the fictional St. Nicholas parish, played to smarmy perfection by Philip Seymour Hoffman—was in fact a child molester, making advances upon a student of the St. Nicholas school. The student, Donald Miller (Joseph Foster), is uniquely vulnerable: he's the first ever Black student at the St. Nicholas school, isolated and friendless. The stern and ever-watchful principal of the St. Nicholas School, Sister Aloysius Beauvier—whom Meryl Streep brings to vibrant life, in an exquisitely modulated performance—is certain that Donald will be assaulted by another student at some point; she didn't anticipate that trouble might come from the creepy priest.
You may doubt, by film's end, that Fr. Flynn is a child molester. I don't think that it's possible to doubt that he's a bad priest. Flynn seems consumed by a desire to be seen as friendly and likable, just one of the people, but in reality he's cozy with the Church hierarchs, who immediately get Flynn another job (at another parish with a school) after Sister Aloysius succeeds in forcing him out of St. Nicholas. we see a brief scene of Flynn dining with his powerful friends, and one is irresistibly reminded of Scorsese's "Casino" and all its scenes of aging gangsters chowing down on Catherine Scorsese's cuisine; Flynn amuses his Church chums with crude stories about "fat" parishioners while stuffing himself with beef and pouring down the wine, and the bishop and the monsignor all laugh at how "wicked" Fr. Flynn is. This is Flynn's real milieu, his true audience—not his parishioners, but his bosses.
As a priest he pretends for public consumption that he's one of the people, but it's merely a well-practiced act. His sermons sound sincere and personal because they're all about himself and his own feelings; if he feels bad or challenged, he writes a sermon about it, and this leads to an astonishing and infuriating scene in which Flynn uses his Sunday sermon to transform Sister Aloysius's reasonable concerns about molestation into a caricature of an "ignorant badly brought up female" who needs a harsh lesson in spreading gossip.
Flynn says he wants to modernize the Church and make it friendlier, but his proposals are superficial and insincere. He comes across like a corporate manager enamored with pretending that he's running a family instead of a corporation, who loves meaningless gestures of friendliness, as if the profound problems with the Catholic Church and the seething hostility of its doctrines could somehow be cured by treating the parish's children to ice cream and camping trips. Flynn is altogether too interested in doing things with children, you may notice. He pushes his way into Donald Miller's life, claiming that he's "protecting" the boy—but how good is it for Donald, really, to be seen as the parish priest's favorite?
Sister Aloysius may seem harsh and forbidding in contrast to Flynn's oily niceness. She's fixated on enforcing school rules and maintaining high standards, and is altogether too concerned with penmanship and ballpoints; all the students are afraid of her. But she is correct when she rebukes Fr. Flynn for acting like the Church is a family, and for pretending that he's just another sinner on the same level of his parishioners. The power imbalance is far too great, and Fr. Flynn's play-acting at being Donald Miller's surrogate father may well have ruined Donald's life, even if there was nothing sexual about it. It's no sweat to Flynn, though, when it goes wrong—not when he can appeal to his Church friends to get him another job.
Did Father Flynn do it? Ultimately it doesn't matter. If if he didn't, he's still awful.
~Chara of Pnictogen