Co-written by its co-star and co-producer Steve Coogan, a comic creator and performer of often ruthless wit, and directed by Stephen Frears, a resourceful director who’s great at giving muscle to meaty material but at a loss under any other circumstances, Philomena has quite a bit more on the ball than the average feel-good movie. But a feel-good movie is, as it happens, what it ends up being. Although to the movie’s credit, it’s entirely arguable that its positive vibrations aren’t a function of commercial considerations so much as overall fair-mindedness on the part of the moviemakers.
The picture is based on a true-life story, written up by British journalist Martin Sexsmith in a newspaper account and then a book, of an Irish woman moved to seek out the child that was taken from her by the Catholic Church some fifty years before, when she was a “wayward” teenage mother. Coogan plays the role of Sexsmith, here depicted having just left a cushy government job under a bit of a cloud. For Coogan, this is the first time in a long time that he’s played a media figure who isn’t entirely fatuous (his most famous creation in the U.K. is insanely un-self-aware chat show host Alan Partridge) or some kind of mad genius (his Tony Wilson in the great 24 Hour Party People). No, Sexsmith is an old-type natural fouled-up guy, a little glib, mighty cynical, pushed into a world where his ambition to “write a book on Russian history” raises eyebrows wherever he goes. The prospect of doing a “human interest” story for a newspaper appeals to him little, but he does need the work. And so he pursues the story brought to him by Philomena Lee, an older Irish mum who’s feeling pangs over the absence of her child. Together the two embark on a journey, first to the convent where Philomena toiled and suffered and eventually was deprived of her child, and then to America, where, it seems, said child was brought after having been more or less sold by the church.
The movie indulges in some not-unfamiliar two-mismatched-fish-out-of-water comedy, most of it raised to a higher level than it might have been otherwise by the very able lead performers. Dame Judi Dench plays the title role, and she tones down her natural formidability to give her character a series of poignant, and sometimes poignantly comic, grace notes. Coogan’s scripting also resourcefully throws some narrative curveballs, as when Sexsmith is forced to deliver some tragic news to Philomena in the almost insultingly banal context of a hotel buffet breakfast.
Many critics have expressed dissatisfaction at the film’s resolution, which (let’s see if I can keep this as unspoilerish as possible) sees one of the lead characters insisting on forgiving some people, and a particular institution that had been responsible for some very bad actions. There sure are a lot of angry film critics out there, I gotta say. I don’t think the ending of Philomena lets anyone “off the hook” in and of itself; it merely posits forgiveness as a virtue by which one is better able to live with oneself and one’s fellows. You want a balls-to-the-wall condemnation of the Catholic Church, go watch Ken Russell’s The Devils. Philomena aims for something a little more measured, and kind. Does that make it treacle? Not necessarily. But as well made as the movie is, its pitch is straight down the mainstream middle (brow). Which may irritate some Coogan fans but ought not surprise anyone who’s seen Dench in a non-James-Bond movie in the last decade or so.