Lukewarm Guilt

THE WISE OFTEN remind us that when good things happen, we credit ourselves, but when bad things happen, we blame the Almighty. A lot of nasty things have happened in the convent of the Little Sisters of Mary Magdalene, which means the title of Agnes of God is not the only place where the name of the Good Lord appears in this film.

Young Agnes (Meg Tilly) is the serene, pimply-faced innocent who, like the namesake of her order, has gotten herself into a bit of trouble. She hides her pregnancy both from her fellow sisters and her own troubled psyche for the nine months. But when the child is born, either Agnes or someone else strangles the child with its own umbilical cord.

And that's when Dr. Livingston (Jane Fonda) enters the scene, armed with Dr. Freud and a court warrant, determined to find out if Agnes has all her marbles before the trial begins. Her efforts are slowed by the government, the Church, and, for her own reasons, the indomitable Mother Superior Anne Bancroft). All parties are determined to see the case quickly brushed under the rug, which places Fonda in her familiar, irritating role of crusader. Amusingly, Fonda chain smokes throughout the movie, which certainly won't sell any videos.

ALL PARTIES DRAG in their psychological garbage for viewer perusal, which consists mostly of good old-fashioned Catholic guilt. Livingston's sister died in a convent, so she would like to hate Catholicism, except her senile mother makes her feel guilty about being ungodly, and professional ethics call for objectivity in the case. Agnes thinks her child's father was God, so naturally she has ambiguous feelings towards her heavenly spouse. And poor Mother Superior has the misfortune of also being Agnes's aunt, which makes her feel responsible both for Agnes's abuse as a child and Agnes's eventual conception.

All this profoundity leads to a little bit of overacting on everyone's part. Fonda expressing her love for Agnes and her wish to help has all the old cornyness of the Three Faces of Eve psychodrama. But the actresses are all of high caliber, so the sound and fury is controlled and realistic.

A more serious problem with this film is its lack of real dynamism. "Heaven," according to the Talking Heads, "is a place where nothing ever happens;" so Agnes of God is quite close to paradise. Though the film is structured like a psychological detective story, nothing is really detected about the crime. And what is detected about the characters is strictly expository; it doesn't lead to any changes or resolutions.

The gravest fault of all with this film is its insistence on answering all questions ambiguously. But real contradictions and questions appear in the movie that should upset Livingston's new found spiritual agnosticism. Which of the conception stories do we believe, and why does another nun appear to have acted as liason in one of them? What was the Mother Superior's real role in the crime? After all, she was present exerting her maximum influence on Agnes during hypnosis, and one can lie under hypnosis. And who is the baby's father?

The desired end of this film was to argue for the presence of mystery in the modern world. Instead, the film demonstrates how modern man, and modern film, often chooses to answer real worldly and spiritual questions by taking a cowardly agnostic duck. To paraphrase the Good Lord, I'll take a hot movie or a cold movie anyday, but a lukewarm movie unsettles my popcorn.