Doubt

Some months ago I'm sitting happily in a theater with perhaps a small Cherry Coke or nothing at all and enjoying the trailers when this comes on. Meryl Streep giving the stink eye to Philip Seymour Hoffman, she dressed as a nun and he a priest. They appear to be hamming it up, exchanging wild pronouncements in the arch fashion of Merlin dueling Madame Mim. I wait for a cell phone to ring on the soundtrack so that Meryl can pause and scold the audience for not silencing our electronic devices. Then I realize this is a real trailer for a real movie. Yes, our two master thespians costumed for a grade school pageant and pitched in rhetorical battle. It's so ludicrous that if it weren't great it wouldn't exist at all.

It takes religion to make a person this insufferably unreasonable and rigid. There's one in every movie, often on the PTA (see Field of Dreams, Donnie Darko) but usually relegated to the role of minor antagonist or mere nuisance. Sister Aloysius Beauvier takes center stage for once, and I was grateful for the opportunity to subject such a shrew to full scrutiny, to lay bare the contemptible rot beneath her self-righteous veneer, because we all know such people and they are the true villains in our lives.