UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
I’d like to recommend to you a movie Steve and I saw on the day after Thanksgiving–Stephen Frears’s Philomena, starring Judi Dench. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, since I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t yet seen the movie. Many of you will already know that the film recounts the real-life story of an Irish woman, Philomena Lee, who gave birth to a child in one of those homes for unwed mothers run by nuns in Ireland. The little boy was taken from her and sold to a couple in the states, and she spent years searching for her son–the focus of the film’s plot.
The plot has the makings of a political diatribe–evil nuns, censorious Catholic attitudes towards sex, lies, secrets, and silence. The cruelty and duplicity of the nuns with whom Philomena deals is breathtaking. A filmmaker with a heavier hand would no doubt have bulled the story along in a determined, monochromatic way that allowed us to leave the theater full of righteous indignation against those who did Philomena wrong, ruined her life, and (spoiler alert) thwarted her attempt to find her son. All in the name of Jesus and his divine mercy, it goes without saying, of course . . . .
Frears’s touch is much defter, however, and the story succeeds at getting under the skin as a result–and then won’t let one go. I’ve struggled for days now with the movie’s lack of clear resolution, its lack of the kind of moral indignation that would let me off the hook as I tussle with the thought of those evil nuns, those Catholic authority figures with their censorious notions of sex, the lies, the secrets, and the silence.
Instead, what Frears offers as the plot unfolds are quicksilver shifts from rage to tears to laughter, none of which allows one to nestle cozily down into a space of easy outrage. What we get instead is a story of unexpected redemption in which Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), the English journalist who offers to help Philomena search for her son and tell her story, and who has all the appropriate enraged responses to the evil nuns we ourselves also have, becomes Philomena’s disciple in the spiritual life. Hearing from her a story of grace and forgiveness more complicated than the one he’d prefer to have heard and told–a story that ends up implicating him . . . .
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.