Philomena (12A.)
Directed by Stephen Frears.
Starring Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Mare Winningham, Anna Mitchell-Martin and Michelle Fairley. 95 mins
Philomena is a tearjerker, but without the long face. The story leads you to expect being buried under mounds of misery. After becoming pregnant from a one night stand a young girl in 1950s Ireland is forced to go and live with the nuns after her family throw her out. A virtual prisoner she is then made to give up her illegitimate son for adoption. 50 years later the title character (Dench) joins up with journalist Martin Sixsmith (Coogan) to try and find out what became of him.
Yes, there are hanky moments but mostly it is played as a mismatched comedy duo with Philomena puncturing Sixsmith's Oxbridge pomposity and him having to suffer her simple minded view of the world and refusal to blame Catholicism for her suffering. This breezy approach is both welcome and very effective: it means that the emotional moments really get to you because they aren’t running to a schedule and they aren’t always what you expect. When the film reduces you to emotional rubble it doesn’t stop and pat itself on the back. It also makes its inditement of the institutional cruelty of the Catholic Church that bit more powerful.
Frears handles it all with casual assurance and Dench is, of course, excellent. This is Coogan’s fourth film of the year and is perhaps the one that is closest to his heart. First he has co-scripted it (with Jeff Pope) and produced it through his Baby Cow production company. Secondly the Hacked Off member gets to play an unsympathetic journalist.
Being played by Steve Coogan in a film is getting to be equivalent of Albert Goldman writing your biography; you’re not going to come out of it well. Joining Tony Wilson, Paul Raymond and Steve Coogan on the list of real life people who have been unsympathetically played on screen by Steve Coogan is former BBC Washington and Moscow correspondent and ex-New labour spin doctor Martin Sixsmith. Overall one of the most impressive thing about the film is how rounded it is about human relationships, how it gives even the most repellent figures some understanding. Yet right up to the end Sixsmith, who is hardly the gutter press, is presented as being aloof, superior and disdainful; the film can’t find it in itself to cut him a little slack. He is doing a good deed after all and, as the film so powerfully and entertainingly shows, when it comes to pure evil, journalists have got nothing on a good Nun.
Directed by Stephen Frears.
Starring Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Mare Winningham, Anna Mitchell-Martin and Michelle Fairley. 95 mins
Philomena is a tearjerker, but without the long face. The story leads you to expect being buried under mounds of misery. After becoming pregnant from a one night stand a young girl in 1950s Ireland is forced to go and live with the nuns after her family throw her out. A virtual prisoner she is then made to give up her illegitimate son for adoption. 50 years later the title character (Dench) joins up with journalist Martin Sixsmith (Coogan) to try and find out what became of him.
Yes, there are hanky moments but mostly it is played as a mismatched comedy duo with Philomena puncturing Sixsmith's Oxbridge pomposity and him having to suffer her simple minded view of the world and refusal to blame Catholicism for her suffering. This breezy approach is both welcome and very effective: it means that the emotional moments really get to you because they aren’t running to a schedule and they aren’t always what you expect. When the film reduces you to emotional rubble it doesn’t stop and pat itself on the back. It also makes its inditement of the institutional cruelty of the Catholic Church that bit more powerful.
Frears handles it all with casual assurance and Dench is, of course, excellent. This is Coogan’s fourth film of the year and is perhaps the one that is closest to his heart. First he has co-scripted it (with Jeff Pope) and produced it through his Baby Cow production company. Secondly the Hacked Off member gets to play an unsympathetic journalist.
Being played by Steve Coogan in a film is getting to be equivalent of Albert Goldman writing your biography; you’re not going to come out of it well. Joining Tony Wilson, Paul Raymond and Steve Coogan on the list of real life people who have been unsympathetically played on screen by Steve Coogan is former BBC Washington and Moscow correspondent and ex-New labour spin doctor Martin Sixsmith. Overall one of the most impressive thing about the film is how rounded it is about human relationships, how it gives even the most repellent figures some understanding. Yet right up to the end Sixsmith, who is hardly the gutter press, is presented as being aloof, superior and disdainful; the film can’t find it in itself to cut him a little slack. He is doing a good deed after all and, as the film so powerfully and entertainingly shows, when it comes to pure evil, journalists have got nothing on a good Nun.
