Novitiate 2017 123movies

Watch: Novitiate 2017 123movies, Full Movie Online – 1964. Cathleen Harris, in her late teens, has resided at the Convent of the Beloved Rose in her home state in the American south for close to two years, first as a postulant for six months, before taking her first vows to become a novice. Unlike the other postulants and novices, Sister Cathleen was raised in a household without religion, let alone Catholicism. As such, her decision to become a nun, which went against her divorced mother’s wishes, may be more secure in her mind than her colleagues for which this life course may be more bred within them. The convent is led by the Mother Abbess, Reverend Mother Marie Saint Clare, whose entire life is this convent off of where she not stepped foot in forty years. Reverend Mother believes she is the voice of God within the walls of the convent, and thus does not tolerate any of the sisters questioning her authority. She also believes that the Catholicism which she has known all her life is perfect. When she receives an edict regarding the Second Vatican Council – more commonly referred to as Vatican II – which, opened in 1962 as a process to make the Catholic church more open to modern ideals, she refuses to implement any of the changes, let alone discuss the edict with any of the sisters, especially with the likes of Sister Mary Grace, the Mistress of Postulants and Novices who has more contemporary views of the church. Sister Cathleen’s drive to become a nun is set against this backdrop, her process which is not as easy as it appears to the others, and whether she makes it to nun is affected by the Reverend Mother’s strict methods and refusal to modernize..
Plot: In the early 1960s, during the Vatican II era, a young woman training to become a nun struggles with issues of faith, sexuality and the changing church.
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Ratings:

	6.7/10 Votes: 4,491
	86% | RottenTomatoes
	73/100 | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 136 Popularity: 8.302 | TMDB

Reviews:

Salacious view of pre-Vatican II monastic life saved by Leo’s over-the-top Mother Superior from hell
Novitiate is sort of like a piece of candy. It tastes good but you know it’s really not good for you. This is first- time feature writer-director Margaret Betts take on Catholic monastic life just as it’s about to go through a tremendous upheaval due to the reforms enacted by Vatican II under the tutelage of Pope John XXIII.

Like all good melodramatists, Betts’ vision of the Catholic church is pure good and evil. She has an inordinate amount of sympathy for her protagonists, the young nun postulants and their mentors and an over the top disdain for an evil mother superior from hell.

Betts’ opening scene is the weakest in the film. She introduces us to her goody-two-shoes protagonist 17 year old Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), in the home of two bickering parents, the outspoken mother played by a rather good Julianne Nicholson. The dialogue between the parents is laced with profanity and the domestic discord is wholly generic in nature–suggesting that Betts didn’t bother to take any time to flesh out her characters at this juncture.

Fortunately our break into the Second Act comes rather quickly and we’re thrust into the action centered in a Catholic monastery in the Midwest circa 1964. The withdrawn Cathleen disappoints her non-religious mother Nora by her decision to enter the convent. There she meets another saintly character, Sister Mary Grace (played by the most attractive Dianna Agron of Glee fame) who shares her pristine devotion to God and love of ritual which most people in the outside world would look down upon.

The setup is to present the fledgling novitiates as pure, chaste, do-gooders who become victims at the hands of the vicious Reverend Mother, deliciously played by Melissa Leo who virtually saves the film from complete mediocrity. Yes it’s disappointing that Betts doesn’t have a shred of sympathy for the Mother Superior and her enforcers and presents them as one-dimensional, stereotyped martinets. But by the same token, Leo is so over the top in her portrayal of calculated viciousness that we end up feeling great enjoyment at “hissing the villain.” Thus Betts has successfully incorporated the primary directive of the melodramatic screenwriter’s lexicon: make sure your villain is effective-the more evil, the better!

Contrary to the pronouncement of numerous critics, the machinations of Sister Cathleen and her buddy postulants, fail to make for compelling drama as their pious devotion is all rather perfunctory. There’s the expected lesbian dalliance with Sister Cathleen in need of some tender loving care at the hands of a recently transferred novitiate, as well as the completely unbelievable scenario of one of the nuns entering a chapel and stripping completely naked (in Betts’ view, the repression is so intense that this would lead one of the nuns to do such a thing!).

No it’s strictly when we focus on the Reverend Mother that Novitiate has any gravitas at all. Pure goodness in the form of Sister Mary Grace resigns because she simply can’t take the Reverend Mother’s unflinching, cruel treatment of her innocent charges. And watch Leo pounce when she humiliates her nuns-in- training at the Chapter of Faults, a group meeting where novices kneel on the floor, confessing self-failings.

Sister Hosea Rupprecht of the Catholic News Service bemoans how Betts’ depiction is manipulative and presents an unfair understanding of the ritual: “This aspect of monastic life was meant to encourage rigorous morality, and keep the community healthy by cleansing it of festering secrets. Yet, as portrayed here, it will certainly strike even some Catholics as extreme. All the more so, since Reverend Mother manipulates the process to her own ends.”

Perhaps the most enjoyable scenes are where the Reverend Mother gets her comeuppance, first at the hands of a priest who’s been sent to chastise her for failing to enact the Vatican II reforms and then by Cathleen’s Mom, who notes that her daughter has lost a great deal of weight and threatens to pull her out of the convent if nothing is done.

Novitiate does well in providing us a nice history lesson in regards to the effect the Vatican II reforms had on the church. Nonetheless, Betts chooses to present an extreme view of monastic life and fails to capture both the good and the bad in her characters. For a more nuanced depiction of Catholic devotees, see Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird”-where sympathy for the characters is much more paramount as well as balanced.

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 2 hr 3 min (123 min)
Budget 0
Revenue 580346
Status Released
Rated R
Genre Drama
Director Maggie Betts
Writer Maggie Betts
Actors Melissa Leo, Lisa Stewart, Alyssa Brindley
Country United States
Awards 5 wins & 14 nominations
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Dolby
Aspect Ratio 2.35 : 1
Camera Arri Alexa (Arri Master Primes.)
Laboratory Chapman/Leonard Studio Equipment, USA (dailies)
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm
Cinematographic Process N/A
Printed Film Format D-Cinema