Norman Jewison has spent his career making movies that often address touchy subjects: racism in "In the Heat of the Night", anti-semitism in "Fiddler on the Roof", fascism in "Rollerball", destruction of livelihoods in "Other People's Money" and the racism of the criminal justice system in "The Hurricane". With "Agnes of God", he focuses on religion.
Meg Tilly plays a novice nun who gives birth to a baby and throws it in the wastepaper basket, killing it. A psychiatrist (Jane Fonda) gets brought in to see if she's mentally competent to stand trial. Over the course of the movie, all manner of surprising things are going to get revealed.
As expected, Fonda, Tilly and Anne Bancroft (as Mother Superior) turn in fine performances; I wish that there were more movies with women in the lead roles. I guess that the movie's overall point is that there are some things that we can't know, and it's up to us to decide how we interpret things. It's far from Jewison's best movie, but he once again succeeds in looking at an important issue. Moreover, it confirms the diversity of the depiction of nuns in popular culture: jolly (The Singing Nun, The Flying Nun), silly (Nuns on the Run), serious (A Nun's Story), stern (The Blues Brothers) and even disturbed (any movie in the "nunsploitation" genre).
Meg Tilly plays a novice nun who gives birth to a baby and throws it in the wastepaper basket, killing it. A psychiatrist (Jane Fonda) gets brought in to see if she's mentally competent to stand trial. Over the course of the movie, all manner of surprising things are going to get revealed.
As expected, Fonda, Tilly and Anne Bancroft (as Mother Superior) turn in fine performances; I wish that there were more movies with women in the lead roles. I guess that the movie's overall point is that there are some things that we can't know, and it's up to us to decide how we interpret things. It's far from Jewison's best movie, but he once again succeeds in looking at an important issue. Moreover, it confirms the diversity of the depiction of nuns in popular culture: jolly (The Singing Nun, The Flying Nun), silly (Nuns on the Run), serious (A Nun's Story), stern (The Blues Brothers) and even disturbed (any movie in the "nunsploitation" genre).