Who Is Father Flynn In Patrick Shanleys Doubt: A Parable
A brief history of the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal: After decades of systemic violation of young girls and boys by members of the Catholic order, during which time accusations attained visibility but left no considerable impact on either the Church or Doubh: accused, The Boston Globe launched an investigation that led to widespread attention to the problem in the media and sparked a worldwide imbroglio for the Catholic Church.
Justice has been served. The good guys have won. Somewhere in the pursuit of spiritual and ethical rightness, though, the film loses sight of one important element: the victims. Spotlight, like many features that make the abuse scandal their focus, is not really about the children, now Shnleys into adults, who endured unspeakable physical and emotional trauma at the hands of their religious leaders.
Analysis Of Doubt, A Parable By John Patrick Shanley
It is instead about the people responsible for making their suffering into a matter of public knowledge, and for forcing the priests who caused that suffering to face the consequences of Faather actions. In fact, most movies that focus on the sex-abuse scandal tend to avoid using victims as their protagonists. This is appropriate to a degree: Kids like Donald are rarely able to act as their own advocates. They either do not have voices, or they are understandably too aggrieved, too wounded, too afraid to raise them. Taken from that angle, maybe we should let Spotlight and Doubt off the hook for putting their emphasis not on the tormented, but on their tormentors and their saviors.
Doubt is a parable for a great philosophical debate
Just over two years ago, McDonagh released his second directorial effort, Calvary, a pitch-black comedy about Father James Brendan Gleesona priest in small-town Ireland who is threatened with imminent death by an enraged parishioner during confession. In fact, though, we spend most of Calvary with Father James as he reconciles with his daughter, tends to his flock, and is subjected to a slew of offenses and indignities courtesy of his fellow townsfolk: His church is burned, his dog is murdered, and he winds up on Patricm receiving end of a baseball bat wielded by an angry barman.
As Spotlight is more the story of the reporters than the victims, Calvary is more the story of James than Jack. After bantering a bit, James eventually asks why Jack killed his dog. He uses that opportunity to test James further, asking whether he cried at the sight of his dead pet; James replies in the affirmative. Jack then asks if James cried for all the children who fell prey to the hungers of their priests; James says no, wondering aloud that perhaps he just felt too detached from them to weep. In cinema, people like Jack are usually either bystanders in their own stories or antagonists.
Doubt is a power struggle
Not all films rooted in the sex-abuse scandal follow that guideline, though. The film takes place in La Boca, a small seaside village in Chile where four men of the cloth have been relocated by their superiors; each is at fault for one criminal transgression or another, and they have been defrocked and shoved into obscurity to keep them and the media quiet.
But if watching Sandokan struggle through his life and his anguish is difficult, it is a necessary component Iss the experience of watching The Club, and one which movies like Spotlight and Doubt Douby: lack, and Calvary only gains in context with other movies of its kind. Neither of those films are made worse for their outlook or who their principal characters are, but it is a quiet shame that the most prominent movies about the sex-abuse scandal are the ones that ask us to empathize the least with its true casualties.]
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