Doubt

I saw the film Doubt yesterday. I did not anticipate much, but I was amazed - which is the right way a movie experience should be: it should be far greater than the trailers and your poor imagination can come up with. It was not anything at all like what my relatives had indicated, and it contained deep, dark wisdom - vexatious and troubling, yet the better for having had light shone upon it - which no one had hinted at in their reviews, views, and opinions.

 It all builds up to the scene of the school principal's talk with Mrs. Miller, the mother of a student. It also winds down from there. This scene is the disclosure of the heart of darkness in that celluloid cameo of America. From here on, Meryll Streep's Mother Superior can never be the same.
This film also demonstrated a profound cinematic truth to me. It is the fact that the genius of an actor - or a director, or a scriptwriter - or a gaffer - is part of a complex whole. The actor's genius cannot be entirely divorced from the vehicle in which it is embedded.
The film is a complex symbolic structure...if you will. And it serves to create complex symbolic structures within our consciousness - and the ripples go out to infinity. If this film had been as it had been described to me, a fight between a nun and priest over the Roman Catholic "unpleasantness", then Meryll Streep's acting would have been amazing, forceful, incredibly deep, yet sometimes bordering on excess and being "over the top".

However, her acting being part of a well designed whole, one that is profound and moving in and of itself, becomes indistinguishable from the immensity of the film, and the film cannot be divorced from the immensity of her acting. They both are legendary. And she never missteps. She could only misstep if the film itself made a misstep, and it does not, nor does she. Maybe that is why Oscars tend to cluster about certain blockbuster films: this indivisibility of the threads of genius, rather than the fact that they were commercially successful.
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