Philomena (***3/4)

Britain may not be as class-bound as it once was, but its history gives it a comfort with the topic. At any rate, class is a subject I’ve seen explored far more often in British films than in American ones. Some of the UK’s best known filmmakers, including Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, and this film’s director, Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen) touch on class themes frequently. The story here is the reverse of the one in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies, in which the main character tracks down her birth mother. Here, Philomena (Judi Dench) is trying to find the son she gave up for adoption 50 years earlier. The two films aren’t otherwise similar, except in the way they bring together women who are not sophisticated with characters who are, and who are also better off financially. That other character is journalist Martin Sixsmith, played by Steve Coogan. Coogan also co-wrote the screenplay, based on a book by Sixsmith, who really was, as portrayed here, a former BBC reporter who had been forced to resign from a government post and was thus free to research the story of an Irish woman whose child was taken from her while she toiled seven days a week in a Magdalen laundry.

Another such laundry, a place where Catholic “fallen women” provided unpaid labor, was the subject of The Magdalene Sisters (2002), a bleak but moving film. Adding odd-couple humor and a kind of modern-day detective story makes this film much less bleak, but still moving. In the course of the story, Sixsmith comes to respect Philomena. It would be accurate, but make the story seem trite, to say that she has a different kind of wisdom that he does. Better to say that the film respects both of the characters, the cynical, atheistic Sixsmith, and the open-hearted Philomena, whose faith is unshaken by her betrayal by her church. The mystery of her son’s whereabouts is solved, of course, but in a way that is dramatically satisfying, somewhat bittersweet…and not at all trite.

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viewed 12/3/13 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 12/3/13; revised 1/24/14

Deliver Us from Evil (***)

? First-time filmmaker Amy Berg documents the story of pedophile Catholic priest Oliver O’Grady, who was shuffled around several California parishes before finally being arrested. Three of O’Grady’s child victims, two women and a man, appear, as well as, the parents of one victim, attorneys others associated with the case, and, surprisingly, a placid Father O’Grady. “Father Ollie’s” superior, Cardinal Roger Mahony, is shown in deposition footage. Berg’s film portrays O’Grady’s decades-long history of abuse as part of a pattern of the Church seeking to suppress complaints rather than protect children.

+ A story like this can’t help but be interesting. The tears of the victims are heartbreaking, the descriptions of the Father’s acts revolting, and the complacency of his superiors depressing. I’ve read or heard a lot of criticism of the Church’s celibacy rules, but the movie gives the best explanation I’ve heard as to how this might facilitate an environment in which child abuse might be more prevalent, or more tolerated. The on-screen titles consistently remind viewers of who everyone is.

- I would have thought that hearing from the perpetrator would be the most compelling part of the documentary, but Father O’Grady offers little insight into his own mentality. I would have liked to hear him say why he agreed to appear on film. He expresses remorse, but in a seemingly perfunctory way. Perhaps, as he testifies, he was able to “disassociate” when he committed the molestations, so that while somehow aware of what he was doing, he’s fuzzy about details and, apparently, does not regard himself as a monster. The last segment of the film paints O’Grady’s story as part of a larger picture, but the movie is too short to make this case as compelling as it could be. I also think that, though not all documentaries need narrators, one here could have given the story a clearer shape.

= *** It’s a criticism and a compliment to the movie that it left me wanting more. Not the last word on pedophile priests, it’s still definitely worthwhile for those whose curiosity outweighs their squeamishness about an unpleasant topic.

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The Da Vinci Code (**1/2)

 Too much exposition and not enough character interplay make this adaptation of the Dan Brown mega-seller something of a disappointment, and the Catholic Church shouldn’t worry that many people will buy its far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Apparently there was a best-selling novel on which this movie is based, but I didn’t read it. For those similarly uninformed, it’s the tale of a Harvard scholar (Tom Hanks), and expert on symbols, who teams up with a Parisian police investigator (Audrey Tautou) to solve a murder linked, somehow, with the Catholic Church. So brainy is the scholar that he can see a mysterious writing left by the dead man and immediately discern that it must be an anagram, and can even more quickly solve it. But it’s just the first in a series of riddles that lead back to a mystery behind events of the church’s earliest days. There’s a ton of plot here, and, to her credit, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman manages to make most of it comprehensible in two and a half hours. I couldn’t have recounted the sequence of events after seeing the movie, but I more or less followed the action while it was going on. There’s a brief car chase, and some gunplay, but most of this “action” is Hanks or Tautou explaining the significance of this mysterious object or that historical detail. Some of this detail is real, but the conspiracy theory at the heart of the story seems ludicrously far-fetched, which made the story less compelling. Moreover, Hanks and Tautou are a couple of the most likeable actors anywhere, but their characters are both fairly flat here. This is the third collaboration of Goldsman with director Ron Howard, but whereas A Beautiful Mind and the underrated Cinderella Man were very character-driven movies, that aspect is surprisingly absent. Only Ian McKellen, as a scholarly acquaintance of Hanks’s Professor Langdon, adds a bit of levity to all the turgid exposition. (Paul Bettany, as an ultra-creepy, ultra-pious murderer for God, is also very effective.)

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posted 8/19/13