SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland
Philomena (12A)
Dir: Stephen Frears
With: Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Sophie Kennedy Clark
Runtime: 98 minutes
SCOTS director Peter Mullan tackled the sins of the Magdalene laundries against those deemed “fallen women” in his searing 2002 drama, The Magdalene Sisters. Enraged and implacable, Mullan’s film was a war cry from the heart.
Stephen Frears’s Philomena comes at the subject in a gentler fashion, even managing to leaven the sadness with laughter. What sacrilege is this, one might wonder? What way is this to treat the subject of young women torn from their sons and daughters?
As it turns out, it is the best kind of irreverence, the kind that illuminates as it indicts, that takes no prisoners but does not go for the easy answers either. It is a difficult line to walk, and with anyone other than Judi Dench, Steve Coogan and Frears (The Queen, Dangerous Liaisons) it might have stumbled. While not without a misstep, Philomena links its arm into the audience’s and chums them along the road. By the end, one would happily spend another hour in the company of the titular Philo-mena. Plus, and here is the clever part, one leaves the picture just as stirred as after Mullan’s film.
Philomena is based on the investigative book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC newsman turned Labour Government spin doctor turned ex-spin doctor. When the film opens, Sixsmith, played by Coogan (who also wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope) has recently been unfairly “resigned” by his minister boss and is feeling rather sorry for himself, despite eventually winning the argument and a nice chunk of change in compensation.
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