Clearly I think there are better individual lines from 21st Century American movies. I went back and looked at my list to doublecheck myself, though, and I can say there’s not a single one that took my breath away the way this one did the first time out. It’s why I keep coming back to this line, to this scene. Heck, it’s why I keep returning not just to the film but to the play it’s adapted from, savoring the language in a way that I’ve never savored anything else John Patrick Shanley has written.

To paraphrase, Sister Aloysius tells Mrs. Miller: I believe your child is being sexually abused by a priest here, and that he was chosen because being the only Black student at the school makes him particularly vulnerable. In response, Mrs. Miller levies a titanic line, one which comes out faster than you’d expect. She’s been waiting for this conversation, or at least a cousin of this conversation, and so she doesn’t have to think before she says: “It’s just until June.”

Doubt the stage play and Doubt the film are incredibly similar documents. The dialogue is very nearly identical where applicable; there are more people in the film than the play because there aren’t four people in this parish. And of course they put together a few settings, though, to the film’s credit, they are fewer than you’d think. This scene with Meryl Streep and Davis takes place outside, which is not unique to the picture but is never as effective elsewhere as it is here. Both of them are bundled up against the cold. It’s still technically fall in New York City, although we know that it’s coming up on Christmas pretty soon. (Sister Aloysius, in what is the only funny haha movie in the film, decried “Frosty the Snowman” because it “espouses a pagan belief in magic.”)

It’s a nippy day, clearly. The world is in that flat tone of Mid-Atlantic gray that anyone who grew up there knows well; it’s the dominant color of three solid months in the year. Today, that’s the thing about this line that stands out to me. Usually, it has to do with how much of parenthood is a form of risk management, but today I’m most focused on how far away it is from December to June. Mrs. Miller is counting let’s say twenty-four weeks. When she was carrying Donald, it took twenty-four weeks from his conception to the point where he weighed about a pound, to the point where his facial features became more developed. Twenty-four weeks is one hundred and sixty-eight days, 28,224 minutes. She has prepared to condemn her son to suffering in every one of those minutes, in every one of those days, because she believes that this Catholic school is better for her son than the public school. It will pay off eventually. What are twenty-four weeks compared to the rest of the child’s life, so long as he makes it there? When she responds to Sister Aloysius, what she’s telling the headmistress is that the situation that Donald might be facing is a finite one. Even to the sympathetic reading of that line, it still feels like she’s ordering a frontal assault on a fortified position. Maybe Donald will take it, but how many limbs will he have left?