Novitiate (2017)

Film: Novitiate (2017)
Stars: Margaret Qualley, Melissa Leo, Dianna Agron, Julianne Nicholson
Director: Margaret Betts
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Films about religion are hard to make in the modern era.  During the height of the biblical epic, you didn't need to really allow for nuance.  Ben-Hur, which is an excellent movie in this reviewer's opinion, is perhaps the best example of this: while it occasionally has you looking below-the-surface into conversations about fame, faith, and sexuality, it's the sort of movie that wouldn't fly today.  We'd need a crisis-of-conscious to be a movie that gets into the Oscar conversation, or that would get enough thought pieces to have people clamoring to see the picture.  Novitiate, dissimilar in nearly all ways to Ben-Hur except the religious angle, is at once the sort of movie that would launch those thought pieces, but it's decidedly even-handed in its treatment of a young woman's path to god, and the conservative beliefs of many of its characters.  In doing so, it occasionally feels like it lacks a point-of-view but perhaps is one of the more spiritual films I've seen in a long while, hoping that the audience connects with the journey of the young women highlighted in the picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Cathleen (Qualley), a young woman who after a chance decision by her largely agnostic mother Nora (Nicholson) to go to church, falls in love with Catholicism.  Largely against her mother's wishes, she decides to become a nun, and enters a very strict convent as a postulant, where she is befriended by her mentor Sister Mary Grace (Agron) and is under the strict hand of the Reverend Mother (Leo).  The film unfolds as we learn more about the women that are seeking God, sometimes from standpoints that feel genuine (Cathleen, for example), while others see it as romantic or a familial obligation (one girl does it because she wants to be like Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story, which feels both totally believable as a reason a teenager would devote her life to such work and of course completely impractical).  The struggles within the convent over modernity are magnified as Vatican II is occurring in the background of these young women struggling with the strict, occasionally deeply painful practices employed by the Reverend Mother, and the budding sexuality of Cathleen, who is trying to figure out how to have a romantic relationship with God.

The movie's claustrophobia works in its favor as we see these women realize things about themselves through prayer and near-constant reflection.  Without outside distractions (they have none of the typical romantic or occupational obstacles we normally see in a movie about a young woman), the film is able to show how spending days and weeks on-end forced in silence and observation could result in you questioning everything about yourself.  This results in the film's politics being quite loose-you don't get the typical religious zeal you normally receive from modern Christian movies (there's no uplifting story or a coded Republican message underneath this film's veneer); in such a film, we'd see Julianne Nicholson's mother as the villain, but instead she's seen as more a weary and confused bystander.  Nor is the film particularly liberal in its ideology.  We don't get the sense that filmmaker Margaret Betts is against the church, and certainly isn't against these women's belief in something higher, but wants to more show the complicated nature of devoting yourself to an unprovable cause.  The film's best scene, arguably, is late in the picture in a moment that would normally play as conservative propaganda, where the nuns of the picture weep over the changes that have occurred from Vatican II (particularly that nuns were no longer to be considered "closer to God" than the average parishioner), but instead comes across as a moment of mourning.  These women have devoted their entire life to a belief that has been shattered (it's not a mistake that sexism is underlined here, as priests do not get the same sort of demotion in the church), and it's heartbreaking to watch even if you believe that the reforms of the Second Vatican were ultimately essential to the church's survival.

This scene, and many like it, is anchored by very good performances in the film.  Melissa Leo has a flare for the overacting, and indeed playing a complicated and occasionally cruel Reverend Mother allows for moments where you wonder if you're witnessing a truly great theater performance or perhaps something the director should have reigned in a bit.  However, it's impossible to deny how watchable she is, and let's not forget she's an Oscar winner for a reason-some of the quieter moments in the picture, such as the Vatican II reading or her conversations with the sisters or the archbishop, are splendid.  Leo finds this woman's voice, and humanizes a character that many lesser actors would have turned into a gorgon.  She's aided by bravura work from Qualley and Agron, who play not entirely dissimilar characters, but find unique paths for both.  Qualley, most well-known to audiences for her work on The Leftovers, shows a very strong range in her work (Cathleen bears little resemblance to her work as Jill Garvey), and lands the ending, which is a tricky scene to play (we end having to truly believe we don't know whether Cathleen will take her vows as a Novitiate).  We are left with a lot of unanswered questions that sometimes feel like a cop-out to an audience that aspires for resolution, but perhaps that is Betts' theme for the picture-that faith has to be found.