who’d have imagined?
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 others 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.
Frears, to give him credit, lets the
facts speak for themselves, without judging the “little old Irish woman” at the
film’s center. But we also have to question that suggestion that Philomena is a
kind of provincial simpleton, given her later easy acceptance and even eerie
recognition that her son’s being gay (“I felt he was perhaps oversensitive”)
and her determination to visit her son’s former gay lover. It is she who gets
through the doorway to that important sliver of the past rather than the far
more savvy, stubborn, and knowledgeable Sixsmith.
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 asking. 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
No comments:
Post a Comment