Philomena

I think Philomena ended up doing more things right than wrong, and knew I was seeing something so clearly made for prestige, but goddammit the movie ended up touching me. There’s a sweetness and purity to Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), she may not be a worldly woman, but she’s a good one. And to watch her struggle with her religious convictions, to see the foundations of her faith shaken, is to watch a soul being reborn.

This may sound like a joke, but I am being serious: how many horror stories are there of the Catholic Church being cruel to the Irish? After having a hook-up, Philomena Lee finds she’s pregnant and sent off to a nunnery. There she is housed, delivers the baby, forced into servitude to repay the debts of housing her for a few years, then her child is placed into adoption. The cold, uncaring distance displayed by the nuns seems at odds with the teachings of charity, compassion and love involved in Christianity. But Christianity’s hypocritical standards are part of what moved me so much.

The story mostly concerns a road trip between Lee and Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, pulling triple duty as a co-writer and producer), a disgraced government press agent who is trying to find work in the equally competitive field of freelance journalism. While he denounces “human interest” stories as pure hammy palp, there’s something about Lee’s character and story that brings him in. Maybe it’s the way that an institution has so clearly committed a sinful abuse against her, yet she unquestioningly holds tight to her faith while looking, and hoping, for some details about the son that was taken from her.

Granted this is heavy material, and as more revelations pile up and Lee’s faith gets shaken and reexamined, it only gets tougher, I think Philomena errs when it leans too hard on trying to mine the naivety and sweetness of the main character for cheap laughs against the more sardonic, cynical Sixsmith. Her character is clearly not stupid; she’s just earnest, polite and unfailingly tries to see the good in situations. The world could use more optimists like her, so I don’t know why the movie so heavily tries to make us laugh at her. It’s refreshing to see her accept various story beats with clarity and intelligence. Another problem is that a few scenes stick out as being obvious inventions, namely a climatic confrontation with the cruel Sister Hildegard.

But Stephen Frears, a filmmaker I greatly admire, always knows how to get rich performances from his actors. Dench’s Philomena Lee is a great one, a fully realized human being who may prattle on a bit, but is still lovely company to keep. Her quiet moments of contemplation and hilariously detailed monologues in which she describes a trashy romance novel are equally played with rich subtleties and smart choices. And Coogan’s annoyed Sixsmith displays a truth about many comics: they make fine dramatic actors. He’s still playing a lot of deadpan laughs in the early part of the film, but as it goes on he digs in deeper to the character. The transformation from wanting to tell this woman’s story for profit to genuinely wanting to help her find her son is done so quietly and smoothly you barely notice that the shift is taking place. A staunch atheist, Sixsmith’s buying a tiny Jesus figurine for Lee is a finely realized moment in which we see how layered these characters on and how wonderfully brought to life they have been.