A misguided pileup of cliches
The Secret Scripture (M, 108 mins) Directed by Jim Sheridan ★1⁄2
Dear readers, I have some terrible news to share.
After a decade of exposing my eyeballs and fragile sensibilities to a slew of movies from the Emerald Isle, each one of them fuller than the last with unwed mothers, venal priests, sociopathic orphanage nurses and irresolvable conflicts between people who appear to be completely identical in every aspect of their lives except which branch of Western Christianity they pretend to believe in, I have contracted a dose of Irish Drama Fatigue. And it was The Secret Scripture that was the straw that broke me.
It may be adapted from a bestselling novel, cast with a platoon of thespianic heavy hitters, many of whom have regularly gone home from awards shows with more than just a goodie bag to show for their efforts and directed by a bloke who has a couple of absolute stormers – My Left Foot, The Field
– on his long and storied CV.
But The Secret Scripture reaches the screen as a flaccid, over-long, painfully indulgent and hopelessly contrived load of old hokum that very nearly had me laughing out loud, alone in the back row of an otherwise deserted theatre.
In an abandoned and partly demolished psychiatric hospital, Rose McNulty (Vanessa Redgrave) watches morosely through a grimy window as the ‘‘Obligatory Irish Movie’’ rain begins to fall. Beside her, the ‘‘Obligatory Irish Movie’’ pretty-young-nurse-who-can’tquite-believe-how-awful-peoplecan-be listens attentively as Rose tells whoever she imagines is there that she did not kill her baby 40 years before.
Soon enough, your obligatory kindly-and-hunky psychiatrist (Eric Bana, being quite inappropriately smouldering) shows up to take charge, and we are off down the tunnel of what may be Rose’s memories, to an ‘‘Obligatory Irish Movie’’ sundappled village of the 1940s, where everybody’s business is everybody else’s and the twitch of a net curtain can lead to exile or worse.
Rose as a young woman (played this time by Rooney Mara, with an accent that swoops from can’t-bebothered to Diddly-dee-potaters, often within a single sentence) has arrived in town and is causing quite the stir among the local menfolk.
Leading the pack is handsome young Michael, who is off to join the British RAF and will soon be flying over the very beach that Rose takes her ‘‘Obligatory Irish Movie’’ contemplative walks down.
Later, Michael will be shot down – in a contrivance that had me snorting my coffee into my notebook – right over his home village, and will crash land his Spitfire, uninjured but for a few photogenic scars, right outside Rose’s cottage.
Michael’s competition for Rose’s love is the mysterious stranger she met while swimming, but who turns out to be the village’s bewilderingly handsome and dangerously bonkers priest. And from there, The Secret Scripture meanders along, checking the ‘‘Obligatory Irish Drama’’ boxes as it goes. Unwed pregnancy? Tick. Diabolical workhouse for expectant mothers? Tick. Child given up for adoption who must be found by the final reel? Tick.
Listen, I’ve seen some beautiful and electrifyingly good films that traversed these tropes. I could watch Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in Philomena again today and respect every second of it. But The Secret Scripture, which is based on fiction not fact, plays more like a parody than a serious piece of storytelling.
On the page – at the beach, or on a longhaul flight – maybe this misguided pileup of cliches gets away with its contrivances by spacing them out with some actual character development. But it seems to me that the film version has wasted every chance the book gave it.
At the absolute core of The Secret Scripture is the fact that young Irish men who volunteered to fight the Nazis in World War II were regarded as traitors in some parts of their homeland. But the film doesn’t explain that until it is far too late for any much-needed tension to build. And the final twist, when it arrives, is so maddeningly unlikely and contrived (that word again) that I actually heard myself swear outloud at the screen.
The Secret Scripture is a film that has been assembled from some very promising parts, with enough talent on screen and behind the camera to maybe paper over the cracks for an audience who just want to look at the scenery and have a snooze.
But all the window dressing in the world isn’t enough to hide the fact that this misbegotten load of old tosh really doesn’t add up to a coherent or credible yarn. Avoid.
– Graeme Tuckett