Mother’s load
This tale of unlikely partners searching for an adopted boy has moments of warmth and sprinkles of schmaltz. By Kavish Chetty
Philomena ★★★
IT appears that the most anxious of Steve Coogan’s prophecies have come true. In The Trip, a half-biographical sitcom, “an exaggeration of real life” as he calls it, Coogan styles himself as a man at the edges of an artistic impasse. He is cut adrift into mid-life crisis, floating around with the fear that, after a career of comic personae, he will never be regarded as a serious dramatic actor.
This fear is already announced on the poster for Philomena: against the splash of amber backdrop, Coogan sits opposite Judi Dench, with a pompous tilt of eyebrow and a haughty smear of upper lip. It’s almost too glib an expression, a discomfort with the existential emergencies of the character that weighs upon him throughout much of the film.
Coogan plays journalist Martin Sixsmith and the film itself is an adaptation of Sixsmith’s investigative book, The Lost
Child of Philomena Lee. When we are introduced to Sixsmith, he has fallen from grace. Exposed as a “spin doctor” for the Labour government, he now idles at socialite parties in the dim glare of his shame, struggling to restart his career.
He’s approached by a young woman who suggests he may find a story in her mother, who, 50 years ago, was forced to relinquish her baby boy to adoption under the fierce order of her Catholic convent in Roscrea, Ireland. The three-year-old was sold for £1 000 to Americans.
At first, he scoffs at the idea, the phrase “human-interest story” rolling around his tongue with certain contempt. But later, he falls for the intrigue and finds himself sleuthing through layers of conspiracy alongside the mother in question, Philomena (Dench).
The two make unlikely travelling companions — he a sophisticate and grumbling atheist; she is sweet and provincial, and between them is a generational chasm.
Their quest takes them on a road trip through the gloomy Irish countryside and, later, across America, where they learn surprising twists of fortune and fate in the life of young “Anthony”.
For Philomena, learning to transcend anger in pursuit of forgiveness, the journey is as much geographical as it is emotional and ethical.
Sixsmith is faced with his own set of challenges, gradually coming to replace his bourgeois indifference with a heartfelt sincerity for Philomena’s terrible loss. Flashbacks take us to 1951, where we are shown the callous conditions of the convent, where she suffered similar tragedies to other girls accused of “carnal incontinence”.
Despite its best efforts not to, Philomena often becomes drowsy with sentimentality. It is really Dench, repressing her usual matriarchal energies in favour of a more delicate portrait of frail motherhood, whose dramatic strengths elevate the film above the indulgent tenderness at its core.
Philomena shares some narrative overlaps with Nebraska , also on circuit, and while it ambles along with genuine moments of warmth and humanity, it struggles to banish the spectre of “human interest”, ghosting its edges and threatening schmaltz.