Word: sisterly
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...moral gray areas hidden behind the black and white habits of a Catholic middle school in the 1960s. Where formal propriety has overtaken ethical responsibility and the appearance of certainty is all that remains, the characters struggle to reconcile order and truth. Jones leads the cast as Sister Aloysius, a teacher who plows headfirst through level after level of rigid Catholic bureaucracy to protect her students from the sexual advances of Father Flynn (Chris McGarry), a popular priest...
...Shanley is a master of the literary balancing act, suspending his drama in a web of tension between Sister Aloysius, Father Flynn, and the doe-eyed Sister James (Lisa Joyce), all jockeying for position on a relatively level playing field. The audience’s heart goes to Sister James, whose innocence will not let her believe the accusations; its heads are with Flynn, whose charismatic self-defense is too convincing for our comfort; but our guts are with Aloysius. His skillful writing has earned Shanley a pile of awards, including the 2005 Tony and Pulitzer Prize in Drama...
...actors also seem more than comfortable in their roles. Jones first played Sister Aloysius in the Off-Broadway run of “Doubt” late in 2004 and continued in the part to Tony-winning success. Her take on the nun is unsweetened, to paraphrase Sister Aloysius’s own words, yet sympathetic enough that the audience is able to see the tenderness into the gnarled exterior. McGarry has worked with Shanley on four previous occasions, and his experience is evident in Father Flynn’s wonderfully authentic urban Irishness. Joyce also ably conveys Sister James?...
...readers and viewers of the third novel (Hannibal) know, Lecter grew up a pampered aristocrat in Lithuania, fond of his parents, immensely devoted to his younger sister Mischa. In the last months of World War II, his parents were killed in a Nazi air strike and he and Mischa were held for possible ransom by looters. Near starvation and desperate for food, the looters killed, cooked and devoured the girl. The suggestion is that Lecter's life became a twisted mission to punish all malefactors and dispose of them exactly as his sister...
...Actually, what consumes it, and the movie version, is the 18-year-old Hannibal's tracking down of the dastards who killed and devoured Mischa. (I have to get that West Side Story tune out of my head: "A man like that / He eat your sister.") It's the familiar Freudian tale of a man acting as his own psychoanalyst, plumbing the past to unearth some terrible secret, which he then tries to exorcise - all right, by becoming a serial killer. That's a twist, though hardly a surprise to the people seeing this movie. Nor will Hannibal's method...