Release Date: November 27, 2013
Director: Stephen Frears
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Review: 6.5/10
Philomena is a film I truly wanted to enjoy and expected to rate higher than I did. Despite a terrific performance from Judi Dench in the title role, the film as a whole never quite comes together nor delivers on the promising story at its heart. Stephen Frears is a favorite director of mine, but the direction here is fairly unimpressive. Finally, the script by Steve Coogan (who also stars) and Jeff Pope struggles to find its voice as it desperately works to meld two vastly different views of Catholicism and the specific events which comprise Philomena’s story. I am surprised that so many critics have given such love to this film which strikes me as being a better-than-average film rather than the critical smash it has been made out to be.
As an unmarried teenager, Philomena Lee became pregnant and gave birth while at living at a convent in Ireland. She had contact with her son until the age of three when he was adopted by a couple against Philomena’s wishes; she had no legal say, at that point, and so had no recourse against the adoption. Later in the film, we find out that the nuns actually sold the children in their charge – mostly to couples from America. There are several revelations that ramp up the film’s dramatic effect, but those I cannot mention without including multiple spoilers (making this review one of the more difficult I have had to write).
Through an odd turn of events, Philomena is introduced to Martin Sixsmith (Coogan), a journalist who had recently lost his job with the Labour Government. Although he admits to being uninterested in “human interest” stories, he takes up Philomena’s 50-year-old search for her son and the two begin a journey to locate the young man. The film plays out as a type of road-trip movie between two very different people; this provides some of the film’s lighter moments that did bring a smile or two to an otherwise desperate story.
The two begin their search at the convent, but the nuns are unhelpful. In fact, none of the nuns present when Philomena’s son was adopted will even speak to them. Acting as an investigative journalist, Sixsmith is able to discover that the boy went to America and was likely still living there. The way in which the son is ultimately found seems to happen quite quickly and easily; was it really as easy to find him as the film makes out? It struck me as implausible, but since both Sixsmith and Lee or still alive, I must believe the film’s account of how Philomena’s son was located.
More about finding the son I cannot say without spoiling the film. Is he still alive when found? Is he still living in the United States? Is he married and, if so, does he have children and thus does Philomena have grandchildren? These are all questions the film answers but I will not answer them here. What I can talk about is Sixsmith and Lee’s reactions to what they find. We know at the film’s start that Sixsmith was once Catholic but is no longer so and Lee continues to practice her Catholic faith despite the fact that nuns made her give up her child and stonewall her search for him. At the film’s end, they are on opposite sides of a great divide as Lee is forgiving toward the nuns and Sixsmith holds them responsible for Philomena’s decades-long sadness and guilt.
The story is ultimately not about finding a long-lost child, but about two perspectives toward the wrong done to Philomena 50 years earlier. And so the film never quite congeals because I was torn between following the search for Philomena’s son and the constantly-portrayed dramatic and opposing reactions to Philomena’s situation. Still, it is not a bad film and anyone who accepts that Judi Dench is one of the world’s greatest actress – something which I wholeheartedly do – will enjoy watching her give a complex performance requiring her to be simultaneously light and dark, glad-hearted and sad-hearted, and comedic and dramatic. So, the film is recommendable to Dench fans, but I am afraid I cannot fully recommend it to the general movie-going public.
