by Douglas Messerli
Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope (screenplay, based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by
Martin Sixsmith), Stephen Frears (director) Philomena / 2013
I did not see Stephen Frears’ 2013 film Philomena when it first appeared in theaters. Actually, I should
admit, that I chose not to. Although I love Judi Dench, who starred in this
movie, I felt the film, given what I read in the reviews, was probably a bit
too sentimental and, most importantly, predictable
in its plot; based as it was, on the true story of Philomena Lee, who as a
young pregnant girl, was literally sold in a four-year bondage to an Irish
nunnery, forced to suffer the dangers of a breach birth, and whose child was
sold by that institution to an American couple, I felt I could already smell
the heavy breath of its panting searchers, as they uncover the unpleasant
truths.
But the surprise
here, and the important difference between Philomena and all the other
films and dramas like it is that, despite her sorrow, pain, and suffering at
the hands of the nuns, she has not lost her faith and has found a way to
forgive and perhaps even explain away the acts of these now elderly and dead
sisters of mercy—despite the fact that they have continued to lie to her and
have themselves, so the local populace insist, purposely burned the adoption papers
(while saving Philomena’s own contract to sign away her rights to her own son)
to hide their actions.
And what the
movie doesn’t quite highlight, but very subtly hints at, is that Sixsmith,
fired from his job as a writer for the Tony Blair administration, is in many
ways not so very different from Philomena’s son, who despite his being gay,
worked for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Indeed, Philomena immediately
notices what he misses, as she observes in an on-line photograph of her son,
adopted and raised as Michael A. Hess, that Sixsmith had already crossed paths
with her son in Sixsmith’s former role a journalist-photographer. Indeed, the
men share much in common, particularly if we comprehend Sixsmith’s cynicism as
surely being similar to defense mechanisms which Philomena’s son must have had
to create as being a gay in Reagan’s administration. Michael A. Hess died from
AIDS—the disease for which Reagan had refused to provide research funds.
Predictably that
“little old Irish lady” and the brash Sixsmith bond in ways that are subtle and
hard to imagine, particularly given her preoccupation with popular romantic
novels, the plots of which she recounts in enormous detail, the lack of
“predictability” seeming to be the most important elements of her delight in
the genre.
And then, the total “surprise” in the final encounter with the “terrible” Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), the last living member of the order during the days of its baby-selling activities, who, when confronted by Sixsmith, not only defends her actions but argues for their morality. It all reminds me a great deal of the 2016 French-Polish film I review below, The Innocents. In both these films, we perceive, belief is how you define it, what you make of it. And, quite clearly, Philomena has done the best job of carving out and living a life of a true faith.
“I never saw
that one coming. Who’d have imagined?” Philomena is fond of saying. Who indeed
might have suspected that the little boy at the film’s beginning did, in fact,
recall his mother and visited the Irish community in the hopes of finding her,
and, most surprising of all, had asked his lover to bury him, along with the
many pregnant mothers who did not survive childbirth, in that community’s
cemetery. This seems simply to be something of fiction, not of truth. Yet,
apparently, this is what occurred. And by film’s end both of these unlikely
road buddies have found their way to previously unimagined new lives.
Los Angeles,
September 25, 2016
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (September 2016).
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