Home \ Signature Roles \ Agnes of God (1985) — Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA · 1985 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Dr. Martha Livingston does not believe in miracles, and that is her problem in Agnes of God. Jane Fonda plays Martha as a court-appointed psychiatrist sent to a convent to assess a young nun, Sister Agnes, played by Meg Tilly, who has given birth in secret and whose baby has been found dead. Agnes claims she does not remember the pregnancy, and she claims, in her innocent, unsettling way, that the child was conceived without a man. Mother Miriam Ruth, played by Anne Bancroft, the convent’s Mother Superior, believes Agnes, or wants to believe her, and protects her with a fierce, maternal authority. Martha, a lapsed Catholic with her own history of loss and anger at the Church, is caught between two kinds of certainty: the convent’s faith, and the court’s demand for a rational explanation.
The film, directed by Norman Jewison from John Pielmeier’s play, is structured as a series of confrontations in small rooms: Martha’s interviews with Agnes, Martha’s arguments with Mother Miriam, Martha’s own sessions with a colleague in which her past is slowly revealed. It is a film that trusts dialogue, silence, and the space between two women who are both trying, in different ways, to protect a third. Fonda’s Martha is the film’s sceptic, but she is not a cold one. She is a woman whose scepticism is itself a form of wound. She left the Church after a traumatic experience in her youth, and she has built a professional identity around not believing what cannot be proved. Agnes challenges that identity not by arguing with it, but by being, quite simply, unlike anyone Martha has met before.
Fonda plays Martha with a controlled intensity that is very different from the warmth of her comic roles or the political fire of her 1970s dramas. Martha speaks precisely, listens carefully, and rarely raises her voice, which makes the moments when she does lose control more powerful. In her scenes with Agnes, Fonda lets Martha’s professional mask slip in small ways: a pause before a question, a look of surprise at Agnes’s singing, a hand that starts to reach out and then stops. Martha wants to help Agnes, but she also wants to be right about Agnes, and Fonda shows how those two desires can conflict. A psychiatrist who needs a rational answer may miss the human answer, and a woman who has been hurt by faith may be too quick to dismiss it.
Her scenes with Bancroft are the film’s other centre. Mother Miriam is not a caricature of a stern nun. Bancroft plays her as intelligent, witty, and deeply protective, a woman who has spent a lifetime in the convent and who understands its rules and its consolations from the inside. Martha and Mother Miriam argue about God, about Agnes, about motherhood, and about who has the right to decide what happened to the baby. Their arguments are not won by clever lines. They are won, if they are won at all, by the slow revelation that both women are mothers in a sense — Mother Miriam to her nuns, Martha to a child she lost — and that both are grieving in ways they have not fully admitted. Fonda holds her own against Bancroft, whose stage presence is formidable, by playing Martha as a listener as much as a speaker. She lets Mother Miriam’s arguments land, and then answers them, not with a speech, but with a question that reframes the whole conversation.
Agnes herself, as played by Tilly, is deliberately enigmatic. She sings, she prays, she speaks in a childlike voice, and she seems to live in a world where the convent’s walls are also the walls of her mind. The film never fully explains her, and that ambiguity is intentional. Is she innocent, delusional, traumatised, or, as Mother Miriam believes, touched by something beyond explanation? Jewison does not give the audience a final, comfortable answer, and Fonda’s performance respects that ambiguity. Martha does not solve Agnes in the way a detective solves a case. She comes to understand her, in part, by recognising her own need for certainty, and by learning to live with a question that cannot be neatly closed.
The production context matters for understanding why Fonda took this role. By the mid-1980s, she was known for political films, for 9 to 5, for On Golden Pond, and for her fitness empire. Agnes of God was a different kind of risk: a stage adaptation, largely set in one location, with a small cast, in which the drama depends on performance rather than action. Fonda, who had trained at the Actors Studio and had a long stage history, understood that kind of drama. She plays Martha as a stage actor would: with attention to rhythm, to pauses, to the way a line can change meaning when it is repeated, or when it is left unfinished.
There is also a personal resonance that Fonda has spoken about in interviews over the years, without the film itself making a point of it. Martha’s anger at the Church, her sense of having been failed by an institution that was supposed to protect her, and her determination to protect a vulnerable young woman from being used by that institution, echo themes that run through much of Fonda’s life and work: a distrust of authority when it harms the vulnerable, and a belief that women should be believed, even when their stories do not fit a convenient narrative. In Agnes of God, that belief is tested, because Agnes’s story does not fit any narrative easily, and Martha has to decide whether believing her is a professional failure or a human success.
The film’s ending, in which Martha finally confronts her own past and Mother Miriam reveals a secret of her own, does not resolve the central mystery in a way that satisfies a courtroom drama. Instead, it resolves the human drama: Martha learns to forgive, in part, the Church and herself, and Mother Miriam learns to let Agnes be seen by the world, even if that world will not understand her. Fonda plays Martha’s final scenes with a quietness that is more affecting than any outburst. She does not become a believer, and she does not become a cynic. She becomes a woman who can sit with uncertainty, and who can protect Agnes without needing to own her story.
For Past Tunes readers, Agnes of God is an important signature role because it shows Fonda in the 1980s moving from political cinema to a more intimate, philosophical kind of drama, without losing the moral seriousness that defined her earlier work. Dr. Martha Livingston is not a heroine who saves the day. She is a professional who learns the limits of her profession, a sceptic who learns the limits of scepticism, and a woman who, by listening to a young nun, learns something about her own grief. Fonda plays her with intelligence, restraint, and, in the end, compassion, and that combination — the mind and the heart working together, even when they disagree — is at the core of what has made Jane Fonda one of the most enduring actors of her generation.