While I was happily ensconced at the Estancia Hotel and Spa last weekend, I watched the movie Doubt with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and the superb Viola Davis in a small but pivotal role.

I loved the movie for its richness of text and subtext.  For the multiple storylines that are going on at once...and not really story lines in the sense of an A-line, a B-line and a C-line...as they teach us in screenwriting classes.  In those cases, the story lines are about characters.  In this case, the story lines are about different aspects of faith and their tensions.

Faith versus doubt.  Compassion versus justice.  Suspicion versus Certainty.  Responsibility versus Adaptation.  Black versus white (and not just metaphorically).  It's one of those movies that I will want to watch again and again to glean more about what the writer (John Patrick Shanley) was saying and trying to say.

From time to time, I have found both Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman to go over the top in their roles.  It usually happens when they are surrounded by actors who are less powerful than they are.  In this case, they clearly brought out the best in each other.

And Amy Adams.  What a revelation!  She's been cute in fluffy movies but here she is complex, with motivations of her own that are not altogether altrusitic.  She plays the ingenue nun with convictions of her own to a "t".

Viola Davis plays the mother of a young black boy that Meryl Streep's character suspects has been molested by Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character, the parish priest.  The movie is set in the 60's, just after John Kennedy's assassination.  The black boy is the only African American in the school.

There's a dynamic and wrenching scene between Streep and Davis where the need to protect the boy becomes a wrestling match.  Protect him from molestation?  Protect him from not completing school and being able to get out of the life of African Americans in that time frame?  Protect him from his violent father?  Which is the greater need?

And ultimately, what's best about the movie is it doesn't answer these questions for you.  It asks you to answer them, or at least to ponder them.  I highly recommend the movie to you!

So, I'll have to see the rest of the nominated pictures (especially Slumdog Millionaire) to see if justice was served in the final analysis.  Sounds like an excellent LE/VLE day activity to me.

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