Agnes of God (1985)

*** out of ****

Norman Jewison has made of lot of movies that were considered great, but only a couple that I have thought of as enjoyable films. The best of them were “In the Heat of the Night” and “A Soldier's Story” but my actual favorite is “Agnes of God”, adapted from the stage play of the same name.

In an extremely devout convent near Montreal, the film opens with a pretty sordid scene. One of the young nuns (Agnes, played wonderfully by Meg Tilly) is found bloody and incoherent in her room, and a dead baby with the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck stuffed into a wastepaper basket. Agnes claims that none of it actually happened and a court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Livingstone (Jane Fonda), is sent to establish her sanity.

Agnes is what we might call a real “child of God”. She was raised by an abusive and maniacally God-fearing mother who kept her sheltered to the degree that Agnes has no idea about life in the world. She believes all things stem from the will of God, and even has no idea how she had become pregnant (and no idea how babies are even conceived). She is seen to suffer stigmata. The Mother Superior of the convent (Anne Bancroft, in what I felt was her finest performance) is desperate to keep Agnes sheltered from the world at large, and resents the court and Dr. Livingstone's intrusion into their sectarian lives.  She is also terrified that Agnes will be taken from her and institutionalized, where she will lose her innocence and connection to God.

But not all is as it seems. Bancroft's character appears to be hiding something, and Dr. Livingstone comes to believe there is much more to this crime than meets the eye. The nuns all claim to have had no idea that Agnes had been pregnant (being able to hide it beneath the loose nun's habit), but it begins to seem more and more apparent that someone else was present in that room the night the baby arrived. Further, everyone suggests that Agnes had no access to any man over the time she would have been impregnated, other than feeble and kindly old Father Martineau. We rule him out as a potential father to the baby almost immediately.

Where the movie gets really interesting is the point that we learn that Mother Superior truly believes that Agnes has been touched by God, and that hers was possibly another Virgin Birth. The implications of this idea would be pretty mind boggling – was the baby perhaps the prophesized second coming? And why did the baby die? I can't suggest that the film explores the deeper meaning of these questions, but that they explore it at all made for very compelling viewing.

“Agnes of God” is not for all tastes. It is a slow moving story with very little action or intrigue and perhaps a big too grand in ideas for the depth of the exploration it provides. But outstanding performances (Bancroft and Tilly are both absolutely convincing in their roles) and a very nicely simplistic approach to the cinematography made this a very enjoyable movie experience. Fonda is the biggest hindrance here, as I found her very shrill and much harder to empathize with.  But overall the performances are what makes this so interesting.

If you have no interest in religious ideology, skip this film. But if it interests you at all, this film does travel to places that I have never seen any others go. Well worth your time.