Julia Hamilton finds this film set in 1960s Ireland baffling and dissatisfying.
Reconciliation is a tough gig, is the message of The Miracle Club (directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan), set in 1960s Ireland, dramatising the hard road to reconciliation that four Irish working-class women from the same village embark on during a pil- grimage by bus to Lourdes. A heavy-hitting cast, including Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates, do their best to keep the narrative in the placid realm of the feel-good but the tragedy at the very centre of the story continually destabilises the comedy, revealing the identity crisis at the heart of the film.
It’s 1967 in Ballygar, a fictional, working-class, seaside village on the outskirts of Dublin. The opening scenes of the film focus on Lily (Maggie Smith) placing flowers on her son’s grave. From the tombstone we can see he died at sea in his 20s, decades before. Following this somewhat gnomic beginning, we then meet Lily’s two friends Eileen (Kathy Bates) and the much younger Dolly (Agnes O’Casey, great-granddaughter of Sean) both of whom are dressing up for the variety show to be held in the local church, organised by the rather sympatico priest, Fr Byrne (Mark O’Halloran).
Fr Byrne (who seems more like a therapist than a priest) turns out to have a very good idea which of his parishioners could do with an outing, in this case to Lourdes. With a little help, the three women obtain tickets: Lily (of course), Eileen and Dolly.
Each woman has major issues in the shape of unresolved grief, breast cancer and a sick child, so a trip to that place of miracles, Lourdes, seems literally heaven-sent. Not a single one of this gang of three funny, raucous, opinionated working-class women has ever left Dublin – lots of laughs there – but getting the men in their lives to take responsibility for their domestic wellbeing turns out not to be so funny after all; cue huge outrage and threats of violence.
It’s 1967, and women are meant to be tending the home fires and some. Eileen’s husband (Stephen Rea) convincingly and terrifyingly threatens her with violence when she announces her intention to travel abroad and Dolly’s much younger husband is so incensed at the idea of being left in sole charge not only of himself but also their two young children that he tells Dolly that if she goes she needn’t bother to come back. The genuine rage of the men at the idea of the status quo being tilted in favour of their wives just for once rather sours the supposed comedy of these scenes.
The fourth participant is Chrissy, played by Laura Linney, who has come back to Ballygar for her mother’s funeral after a prolonged absence in America. From her conversation with Fr Byrne, the viewer is given to understand that her relationship with her mother was riddled with difficulties that were never resolved. Going through her mother’s papers in her childhood home Chrissy discovers a note from her mother with – guess what? – a ticket to Lourdes enclosed.
In spite of this, Chrissy is reluctant to join the others as Lily and Eileen were her mother’s great friends, but Fr Byrne encourages her to come, never mind Lily and Eileen’s deep disapproval. In their opinion the rather well-dressed, glamorous Chrissy is an ungrateful hussy who bailed out leaving her poor old mother to manage alone. Listening to the venom in their remarks the viewer can easily imagine what might have led Chrissy to scarper in the first place.
During the rather-too-long set piece of the bus journey tensions flare between all four as close proximity swiftly reopens the wounds of the past in all their ugly, unforgiving det- ail. The screenplay takes an inordin-ate length of time to explain the deep-seated motives behind all the sniping and the passive-aggressive comments, partly because it’s trying to save the best for last. Lourdes glit-ters on the horizon as the place where answers will be found. But what is frustrating is that, actually, they aren’t. The script remains tight-lipped on the secret springs of the action even once at Lourdes: does Daniel (Dolly’s little boy) have an illness or is he just shy? We never know.
Why is Eileen so bitter towards everyone around her, even to the extent of hinting that Chrissie is responsible for the death of Lily’s son, but was she? We never find out. We know Eileen is worried sick about a lump on her breast and enters the waters of Lourdes in the hope of a miracle, but does it happen? No idea. Does Lily get the absolution she so fervently desires for interfering in her dead son’s life? Ask me another. The febrile atmosphere of the shrine with its mixture of holiness, vulgarity and the promise of physical healing should bring everything to a head but by the time the sources of some, if not all of grudges, are revealed, everything is suddenly settled in a remarkably offhand way.
This is supposed to be a comedy but it isn’t really; there’s too much unresolved, unexplained darkness in the characters for it to be the feel-good movie it sets out to be. Even the scenes that are meant to be comedic with the men at the beginning are about what, in our own age, would amount to abuse or at the very least coercive control. Not funny at all.
At the same time this is, on a more frivolous level, a thoroughly enjoyable film: the rackety, shabby Dublin of the old days; the garish, simpler faith of Lourdes in the 1960s. It’s all visually sumptuous, beautifully filmed – wonderful sweeping shots of the Irish and French countryside – with exquisite camera work and brilliant clothes. Throw in Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney and you know it’s probably going to be good fun to watch. It is impossible for Maggie Smith to fail completely in any role.
But quite apart from the fact that the film isn’t sure what genre it belongs in, what also bothered me was its subtle subversion of what Christianity is actually about. The underlying message here is that the Church is best seen as a “belonging” system, the “Club” of the title, and that, with a few small adjustments, the confessional could quite easily be seen as free therapy. It has a genial attendant – sorry, priest – with lots of local knowledge, whose job is to smooth over the rough edges of his difficult working-class women parishioners with their hard lives and selfish/violent husbands; his role is to soothe and suggest, to lend a hand, to swing tickets for an outing, wink, wink.
All very nice, but it isn’t Christianity; it’s religion for a world where everything is relative and being kind covers all bases; it’s what a rather low-grade AI chatbot might come up with if asked to describe what Christianity meant. It’s also a film that doesn’t know quite what its purpose is. Is Maggie Smith having a laugh or a nervous breakdown? A bit of both, perhaps – lots of rough edges hastily smoothed over; but as a whole it lacks the courage of its convictions and manages to leave the viewer feeling both baffled and dissatisfied.
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