In 1952 Ireland, an orphaned teenage girl named Philomena Lee (Sophie Kennedy Clark) is living in a convent after her mother dies and her father abandons her. When she goes to a carnival one night, she meets boy who likes her, and later becomes pregnant out of wedlock.
After the nuns discover her condition, she is forced to become a laborer to them, give birth without medication or pain killers, and when her baby turns three, he is sent away to a new family without her permission. Fifty years later, Philomena (Judi Dench) is fully determined to find out where her son is and what life he leads, with the help of recently unemployed journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan). Martin has just been let go from his BBC job as a government advisor and is considering a new hobby with jogging and writing about Russian history. That is until he meets Philomena’s daughter, Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin), and pitches her mom’s story to him.
Michelle Fairley plays the newspaper head who encourages Martin to write the story, and Mare Winningham plays one of the grown-up babies sold from the convent and the adopted sister of Philomena’s son. There are a lot of things going on in Stephen Frears’ “Philomena” that make the audience ponder. The old lady was treated horribly by the Catholic Church, but never lost her faith or connection to Christianity; the journalist is a Catholic-turned-atheist engaged to a Catholic; and there are some pretty awful nuns, as well as a couple of ‘very nice ones’ (in the words of Philomena). Coogan, usually a comic on camera, brings some charm into Philomena’s heavy story (which is remarkably based on a real woman named Philomena Lee) with co-screenwriter Jeff Pope. Coogan and Dench are paired together in an odd couple way, but they create some more genuine awkwardness and charisma to play off each other, instead of the usual predictable gags.
Clark and Dench bring the title character to life effortlessly, with the former making her mark on the acting scene. While Dench has the more tender and bittersweet moments of the film, Clark is heartbreaking and handles the heaviest scenes in the story.
“Philomena” is one of the most intellectual films of the year; not a blatantly biased secular attack on Catholicism, but rather a must-watch for historic perspective. In an interview recently, the real Philomena stated that some sequences were fictionalized for dramatic effect, like most real life-based movies. But Frears, Coogan and Pope use her tale as a way to have viewers contemplate the separation of church and faith, and the abuses of power. Dench is deservedly on her way to her seventh Oscar nomination, and her fifth for Best Actress.
mbianco@durangoherald.com. Megan Bianco is a movie reviewer who began contributing reviews for Picket Fence Media, a Southern California print and online local news publisher. She also contributes other entertainment related features and articles. She is a graduate of Cal State University, Northridge where she studied film criticism and screenwriting.
Philomena
BBC Films presents a film directed by Stephen Frears, written by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope based on the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith. Starring Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Mare Winningham, Ruth McCabe, Michelle Fairley, Charles Edwards, Simone Lahbib, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Charlie Murphy, Graham Curry and Xavier Atkins. Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements and sexual references.
“Philomena” is playing at the Gaslight Cinema.
