God's Love: Don't leave home without it!
Completely off topic: we watched "Doubt" last night and, while it was good,I think it would have been better served if the plays author, John Patrick Shanley, hadn't directed it. He wasn't able to move beyond the stage claustrophobic, to open it up more for a movie. Streep and Hoffman and the rest of the cast would have done good work for any solid director. I'd love to have seen what David Fincher could have done with the same material.
That movie was quite good, although I think many missed the point in insisting the film should have revealed whether Hoffman's character was guilty or not.
On the one hand, to waver because of uncertainty might inflict great harm on an innocent child. To plow ahead might serve as an injustice and the destruction of the reputation of an adult. Shanley's subtext was, according to interviews, the Iraq conflict as well as the many peripheral issues raised in it (torture, etc.).
We're not often confronted with moral dilemmas of this magnitude on a daily basis, but it does underline that knowing what is "right" is not always self-evident and requires some serious reflection and consideration.
I don't think the film was intended to serve as a generalization of Catholics or Christians in any way. In fact, the more "conservative" character turned out to be the most sympathetic (at least to me).
Hello James-if you noticed, at the end the film was dedicated to the actual "Sister James" and I think that the story came from Shanley's early life, though that's just a guess.
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