The Letters

The premise of The Letters is compelling: A posthumous collection of letters from Roman Catholic nun Mother Teresa revealed she was tormented with doubts, isolation, and grief over her daily experiences in the Indian slum of Calcutta. Audiences should be eager for a story about the struggles of an Albanian woman who left her family for a cloistered life in India, undertook a lifetime of work among the poor, and won unwanted international acclaim.

But despite Juliet Stevenson’s excellent performance as Mother Teresa, this promising film never coheres. The script is didactic, partly due to an awkward framing device in which two priests discuss Mother Teresa’s qualifications for beatification after her death. “She possessed depths of holiness greater than any of us could have imagined,” one of them declares.

Other actions in the film—rated PG for images of suffering—are explained unnecessarily. “The patient you are going to see is extremely ill,” says a doctor walking Mother Teresa down a hospital hallway. Then he shows her an extremely ill man who is writhing with oozing sores. In another scene, an Indian municipal official discusses opening a hospice with Mother Teresa. “There is a building not far from here,” he says. The film cuts to the two standing in front of a building. “This is the building,” the official says.

Most bewildering, the plot has little to do with Mother Teresa’s tormented letters, but centers on the politics of the Catholic Church. Get ready for a lot of meetings: The Vatican hosts several to discuss whether Sister Teresa can leave the convent and start her own order. The local archbishop and the mother general of her convent meet several times over the same question. Cardinals meet to deliberate over her beatification. Too bad the story of a nun’s inner struggles turned into a story about church bureaucracy.