“What do you do when you’re not sure?” Father Flynn asks his Sunday congregation, and then spends the next hour or so answering the question in a film every churchgoer ought to see. Especially if you’ve been brought up to believe that certainty is the major Christian virtue.

“Doubt can be as powerful and sustaining a bond as certainty,” preaches Father Flynn in a series of sermons that alone are worth the price of admission. “And remember that when you are lost in your doubt you are not alone.”

I don’t understand why this movie, based on John Patrick Stanley’s stage play and directed by him, hasn’t won more critical acclaim in New Zealand. The performances of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest and Meryl Streep as the school principal and nun are riveting, and Roger Deakins’ photography captures the muted colours and concrete solidity of Catholic schools 40 years ago.

I suspect the hesitation about Doubt is because our film reviewers are mostly suspicious and certainly ignorant of church culture, which is the real subject of this film. Church culture that’s as familiar to Anglicans as it is to Catholics – a well-fenced, intricately wired world of redemption pumped full of idealism, emotional intensity and dogged hope. People are implacably nice and piously polite. The nastier things get the more formal and polite they become. But it can also be a fallen and flawed world riddled with innuendo, suspicion and half truths conveyed with a touch and glance every time a customary boundary of behaviour is crossed.

In such a culture, issues of sexual orientation and behaviour, abuse and ambition are doomed to be inflated and twisted. And the victims invariably get lost and forgotten in the shuffle of guilt and blame of more powerful players. In this film that happens behind a screen of ingenious excuses and explanations ranging from the length of one’s fingernails to the special treatment Coloured folk require.

It’s hard to convince anyone born since the 70s that this church culture was for many of us a source of great romance and fascination. In pre-TV times, the theatricality of a Eucharist or the teenage intrigues of a church youth club or the dress-up rituals involved in altar serving or choir singing were often the best games in town. This film understands all those attractions and explores them with great sensitivity – both in their expression of beauty and their camouflage of corruption.

And for anyone in ministry who’s been caught between the demands of pastoral caring and wanting to be liked, Doubt is full of insight and wisdom. Just as it is on the issue of Christian distinctiveness.

Archbishop Brian Davis was fond of quoting the definition of Christianity as a vocation to be an alien in this world – an image I always found difficult, probably because of the number of science fiction films I’ve watched. Doubt is the story of an horrendous struggle between a priest who believes we are called to be family together and not to fuss too much about secular and sacred divisions, and a nun who believes being different and preferably unpopular is our true vocation.

Where the resurrection message is in Doubt is hard to say. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been a box office hit in New Zealand. But for me it made unexpectedly exhilarating cinema in the honest and rigorous way it explored a culture that has framed my life so completely that I still can’t see it for looking.

The truth we hide in the name of church often threatens to overturn the truth it reveals, This is a film about that tipping point.
John Bluck is a retired bishop living north of Auckland.