Movie Review - Philomena

Philomena *** ( R) Dame Judi Dench takes on a new type of challenge in this fact-based drama that manages to deliver warm sentimentality and rage at virtually the same time. Stephen Frears directs from a screenplay partly credited to co-star Steve Coogan. At 15, Dench’s Philomena became an unwed mother in 1950s Ireland. Her father dumped her with an order of nuns who ran essentially a sweat shop and orphanage. The girls became forced laborers, with little access to their children, and no rights to oppose or influence their adoptions.

The film opens as the elderly Philomena redoubles her efforts to find out what happened to her son that the nuns handed to a couple when he was a toddler. She’s still around the time he’d be turning 50. She’s led a simple life, raising a family after working off her debt to the nuns, but been stonewalled by the orphanage as to his fate. She turns to an out-of-work journalist (Coogan), who needs to rehab his image and career. Their quest is our tale, taking them to the USA and some surprising developments.

The script includes moments of levity, but it’s mostly an artfully understated study of the characters, with a scathing indictment of the system that allowed such places to exist not only into the 1950s, but shockingly until the late ‘90s. This presentation is less intense than 2002's The Magdalene Sisters, which featured several of these young women during their period of servitude, but no less appalling. Dench plays a simple soul who still feels guilty about her sin of promiscuity, and clings to a reverence for the Church’s authority that seems baffling to others, considering the way she’d been treated from pregnancy to her old age. Tally one more finely nuanced performance in her lengthy, distinguished list. (11/27/13)