The miracle is that this turkey ever got made
Set in an impoverished Dublin suburb in 1967, where the men are either dolts or drunks or both and the women are the only reason anything gets done at all, The Miracle Club is very much seeking to be ‘the sort of film they just don’t make any more’. Unfortunately, somewhere along its underwritten, cliche-strewn way it becomes ‘the sort of film they really shouldn’t make any more’.
I mean, Ireland is chock-full of highly talented actresses of all ages, so you would think that any film-maker of integrity would look first to them. But apparently not. When the parts of two redoubtable Irish women came to be cast here, one went to the very English Maggie Smith and the other to the very American Kathy Bates.
Neither is actively terrible but nor do you really believe in the characters they’re playing. Which is a bad start to a film where a bit of belief and/or faith would definitely help. After all, we are heading to Lourdes in search of a miracles.
But first scenes need to be set and we begin with Lily (Smith) looking sadly at a memorial plaque marking the death of a man 40 years earlier, and then Chrissie (Laura Linney, presumably relieved she’s playing a character who’s lived in Boston for so long she’s allowed to have an American accent) returns to the neighbourhood for her mother’s funeral. She hasn’t been back for, ooh, must be 40 years, says almost everyone. Hmm.
There’s a talent show (first prize; tickets to Lourdes) and a good joke about a bacon joint – then everyone piles into the charabanc for the trip to the shrine and longedfor miracles. Eileen (Bates) has a lump on her breast, Dolly (English actress Agnes O’Casey) longs for her mute son to talk, while Lily is either going for her legs or mental torment. It’s hard to tell.
Anyway, secrets eventually tumble out, they’re pretty much exactly what you expect them to be and we can all go home. Unless director Thaddeus O’Sullivan fancies another lingering
‘Neither is terrible but nor do you believe in the characters they’re playing’
‘Kingsley, the model of actorly restraint, is probably the best thing in this’
shot of one of his characters staring wistfully into the middle distance. No? Now that is a miracle.
Having given Smith and Bates a tough time for playing Irish, I ought, by rights, take the AngloIndian Ben Kingsley to task for daring to play the Spanish surrealist artist, Salvador Dali, in Daliland. And yet he’s the model of actorly restraint in the role and probably the best thing in a film that revolves around Dali’s habit in the 1970s of moving himself, his voracious and domineering wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) and his constantly changing, gender-fluid retinue into a ruinously expensive New York hotel for a couple of months.
Here he would work, throw parties, host dinners and, at least according to the film, observe the occasional orgy. ‘Welcome to Daliland,’ purrs his manager (Rupert Graves) opening the hotel door to the latest recruit, James (Christopher Briney), a young gallery assistant whose temporary job is to make sure the easily distracted Dali actually gets some work done.
Directed by Mary Harron, best known for American Psycho, this is enjoyable and gently revelatory stuff in the manner of My Week With Marilyn, the 2011 film in which another ordinary young man had a fleeting brush with greatness.
Sumotherhood, which if pronounced conventionally would be some-other-hood, is the latest comedy from British actor and film-maker Adam Deacon, and can obviously been seen as a companion piece to his 2011 debut, Anuvahood.
Riko (Deacon) and Kane (Jazzie Zonzolo) are a pair of hapless, hopeless would-be criminals who dream of making it illegally big but are held back by their own incompetence and stupidity.
Yes, the film has some laugh-outloud moments and cameos from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Jeremy Corbyn and Jennifer Saunders, but it also feels like a sketch that has been allowed to go on too long and features a couple of moments that just aren’t funny at all.