Butler's Cinema Scene

Margaret Qually

“NOVITIATE” My rating: B 

123 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The movies rarely treat religion with anything like respect or even intelligent understanding.  Which makes “Novitiate” a welcome anomaly.

Writer/director Margaret Betts’ film — made with a predominantly female cast and crew — is a serious attempt to examine a religious vocation through the eyes of one young woman.

Cathleen (Margaret Qually…she played the daughter in HBO’s “The Leftovers”) is raised by her hard-case mother in the American South during the 1950s.  Mom Nora (Juliette Nicholson) is a drinkin’, smoking’ modern woman with a tart tongue and a disdain for much of Eisenhower-era society.

But she’s devoted to her daughter and one Sunday takes Cathleen to the local Catholic church. Though irreligious herself, Nora wants her child to be able to make up her own mind. Almost against her better judgment, she accepts a free scholarship for Cathleen at the local parochial school.

The girl takes to Catholicism like other teens glom onto Rod McKuen’s poetry.  As graduation nears she announces that she wants to become a nun. Mom is horrified, but what are you gonna do?

And so Cathleen becomes a postulant at a cloistered community run by the hard-ass Reverend Mother (Melissa Leo), who hasn’t left the premises in 40 years.

Revered Mother — the spiritual version of a Marine drill instructor — makes no bones about her intentions to weed out the unworthy.  Her methods are often brusque and borderline cruel, and part of the wonder of Leo’s performance is that the character’s ogreish behavior is, if not likable, then at least understandable. It’s a long-tested system to which she adheres.

Melissa Leo

Sister Cathleen endures all of the restrictions and demands — hours of silence every day, a rigid and demanding schedule of prayer, rigorous (and borderline sadistic) confession sessions in which these adolescent girls must reveal to each other and their instructors their sins and shortcomings.

At least they have a friendly ear in Sister Mary Grace (Dianna Agron, late of TV’s “Glee”), their spiritual personal trainer.  But it turns out that the cloistered life is sometimes too much even for a big heart like hers.

Betts sets her film in the early 1960s, when the revolutionary reforms of Vatican II were trickling down to the grass roots level of Catholic life. Reverend Mother turns apoplectic when she reads some of the missives being issued by the diocese — What? No more self-flagellation? — and balls up the letters in fury and dismay.

Eventually the local archbishop (Denis O’Hare) must make an unexpected visit to lay down the new law in no uncertain terms. Even among the clergy the Reverend Mother has a rep as something out of the Dark Ages.

While Sister Cathleen provides the vantage point through which we learn about life as a holy sister, Betts’ view is considerably wider.  At a certain point “Novitiate” becomes less the story of one young woman than of a way of life which today has all but disappeared.

A final credit informs us that in the wake of Vatican II the church experienced an massive exodus of nuns leaving their orders. Given the evenhandedness with which Betts handles this material, it’s hard to say if she views this as a cause for lamentation or celebration.

| Robert W. Butler