Too Much Certainty To "Doubt"

“Doubt” is a little too subtle, believe it or not. We don’t tend to think of movies as subtle–so many things blowing up, so many emotions played for the back of the house–but frequently, a significant fact is provided to the audience in only a line or two; in a two-hour movie, that is easy to miss. This happens in “Doubt,” toward the end. I think filmmakers fall into this trap because they grow so familiar with a project that they forget the story will be entirely new to the audience. But after watching dailies every day for months, then sitting in an edit bay for weeks and months more, they become familiar with every tic and nuance, and quite naturally lose their ability to consider how others will approach the picture–that is, without any foreknowledge, which, of course, is how audiences come to a picture.

“Doubt” turns on ambiguous interpretations of events and human reaction, but the judgment reached by the female lead in this picture is pretty clearly the one that about 99.9 percent of people would make, too. It’s almost impossible for a reasonable observer to make any other choice because any reasons for that other choice are so subtly presented that they are lost. In a great irony for this picture, too much subtlety creates too much certainty–we don’t really hear the other side of the case. Thus the “Doubt” of the title loses much of its impact: The lead character ends the picture with doubt about her faith, her God, and the wisdom of her actions–and so the audience may doubt, too–but nobody doubts the conclusion she draws. I think we were supposed to be able to do that.

Then again, maybe somebody else who saw it feels entirely differently about the subtlety and certainty in the picture. I hear that was the point.