Novitiate

"Novitiate" treads awfully close to some tantalizing psychological and emotional questions. One problem is that it skirts such terrain, rather than trespassing softly on sacred ground; another is that the film never quite decides whether it's about one woman's faith journey, or the challenges presented by a vast, ancient institution making itself over for the modern world. Both stories are present, but neither is fully accounted for.

The film starts in the '50s and then, by fits and jolts, makes it way to the early '60s. The sexual revolution hasn't even happened yet, but teenager Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, "The Leftovers") finds fault with the way her single mother, Nora (Julianne Nicholson), entertains various men.

Then there's the way her father, Chuck (Chris Zylka), unceremoniously left the family years before. Where can Cathleen find a strong father figure? A role model of upright moral conduct? A parental protector who embodies virtue and strength?

As it happens, local nuns have provided Cathleen a scholarship to attend classes at their parochial school. It's there that Cathleen discovers her father -- her heavenly father, that is -- and realizes that she's been called to devote her life to God.

Better still, she can fulfill her longing for love that requires everything she has to offer and become a "bride of Christ." That's right: The church that to this day bemoans gays and lesbians marrying one another evidently once held (or perhaps still does) the belief that Jesus is the ultimate polygamist, husband to uncounted thousands of women who have taken the vows.

It's hard, watching this film, to know what writer/director Margaret Betts intended, or where she falls philosophically on various theological and moral questions. The film takes place just as the reforms of Vatican II are being ushered in -- reforms that, on the face of them, don't seem so terrible. Asking priests to face the congregation and say the mass in English instead keeping their backs turned to the faithful and droning on in Latin? What's unreasonable about that? The ceremony may take place in the House of God, but it's the parishioners who pay the rent and they ought at least to be made to feel welcomed and included.

Then there's the question of the church's views regarding human physical reality -- everything from sexuality to devastating bodily punishments as a remedy to spiritual weakness to a denial of simple creature comfort. Does it perhaps make more sense to nourish the spirit by treating a person's body -- described by Jesus himself in the New Testament as a temple -- with respect and care?

All these questions are fair game for dramatic interrogation; after all, they remain controversial to this day, with religious hardliners still resenting what they see as unacceptable changes to the church's institutions. But the crux of the issue here is how those changes annihilated the exalted place of nuns. We learn very late in the game that more than 90,000 nuns quit the church, and who can blame them? -- though this, too, could have served as a starting point of inquiry.

What is the religious life of the nun, exactly? Is it surrender to an abusive male intimate who is not actually present, which is what some of the voiceover we hear suggests? Is it devotion in the service of others? Or is it some sort of ego trip that accommodates all sorts of self-flagellation and self-abnegation but curdles the moment one's special status in the eyes of God is supposedly stripped away by the decree of a cabal of men in Rome?

We never find out. We're not given much in the way of the veteran nuns' point of view. We do meet one fully avowed nun who questions her place in the particular order Cathleen has joined -- the Roses, they call themselves -- and we get a stereotypically abusive and power-mad Mother Superior (Melissa Leo) who berates her charges with a fury that seems absolutely unhinged. (To her credit, Leo brings terrific presence to her role, and when Mother Superior clashes with mother Nora, the heat of the exchange threatens to dry up all nearby reservoirs of holy water.)

But the typical workaday nun who's been going about her daily rites for years? We see very little of them, aside from a room full of sobbing nuns hearing the news of Vatican II. (There is a nun who charges into the monastery's refectory during dinner one day in a state of undress and begins raving, but one hesitates to assume that she's a typical case.)

Instead, we see a group of young nuns enduring the initial phase of their vocation -- their novitiate -- during which they learn how to walk with brisk purpose, eyes focused on the ground ahead. They also learn how to kneel in front of all their fellow novitiates and critique themselves, then accept accusations from the others in the circle. (Whether this sort of thing leans more in the direction of cultishness or EST could be a topic for a post-show discussion.)

Perhaps most difficult of all is the separation from family -- from human contact from the outside world in general, and even within the monastery walls there's a strict prohibition on "particular friendship." When, here and there, such friendships crop up, they are both "occasions of sin" (in the parlance of old school Catholicism) and potentially career-ending infractions.

Still, could some discreet and pragmatic sisters be doing it for themselves, and each other? Here, too, the film ventures only so far. We follow Cathleen as she struggles with her youthful urges, with feelings of isolation, with family tragedy, and with her faith. We see her take to the severe wardrobe of the life she's in the process of choosing and, at a couple of junctures, don a bridal gown for her symbolic wedding to Christ. (No kidding. I reiterate: This is the same faith tradition that even in 2017 not only continues to denigrate same-sex couples and parents, but in some places has even moved to deny deceased gay Catholics in same-sex marriages religious funerary rites.)

Cathleen struggles to find her way closer to God. Her mother struggles with the choices she watches Cathleen making. The Mother Superior, too, struggles -- against Vatican II and the high-handed male archbishop (Dennis O'Hare) that treats her with the same mix of malice and condescension she shows toward the nuns in her order. But mostly, it's the audience that struggles -- first to put the film's various threads into some sort of coherent story, and then to stay awake. The quest for atonement with the Almighty may well take lifetimes, but a movie shouldn't feel like it's turned into an eternal torment. "Novitiate" breaks the cardinal rule of movies: Thou canst be cold; thous canst be opaque; thou canst even be narratively muddled; but thou shalt not be boring. In the end, for all the signs of the cross this movie makes, the predominant shape in the air are Zs.