Philomena
Stephen Frears (2013)
The set-up is pedestrian – not only the description of Martin Sixsmith’s cynical state of mind after he’s lost his job as an adviser to the Blair government but, more important, the flashbacks to Philomena Lee’s teenage life in Ireland. Her meeting with the man who gets her pregnant (almost needless to say, they go to a fairground before sleeping together). Her anguished labour in the Roscrea convent. Her life there for the first three years of her son Anthony’s life, before she loses him for ever as he’s driven away from the convent to a new life in America. These sequences have the quality of mere reconstruction – they don’t have a life of their own. There are several reasons for this. One of them is Judi Dench: from the moment she appears, she’s so emotionally powerful as the elderly Philomena that any other perspective on this woman’s traumatic past is almost bound to feel secondhand. But there are more negative reasons too: even if you didn’t know when you entered the cinema what Stephen Frears’s film was about, you’ve been told by the time the flashbacks arrive that Philomena’s infant son was taken from her.
Until it gets to the meat of the story, the screenplay by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, based on Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, is unimaginative: one perfunctory little scene fills you in on how Sixsmith parted company with the government; another illustrates what a pain he is, not only to meet socially but for his wife to live with. And Coogan’s playing of Sixsmith in these early scenes is as unsubtle as you’d expect: he interprets miserable bitterness by pulling a long face and delivering his lines in a nasty, sullen monotone (while, of course, exuding self-satisfaction with his delivery of them). In some respects, the screenplay remains sketchy throughout. Legends at the end of the film refer to the real Philomena’s children and grandchildren: these can’t all have materialised since her meeting with Martin Sixsmith in 2002 but in the film she has just the one daughter, Jane (Anna Maxwell Martin). There’s no mention of what happened to Philomena’s husband – or what it meant to her keeping Anthony a secret from him in particular. It may be true, but feels falsely convenient, that Jane learns about Anthony just as she’s about to go out to waitress at a drinks reception where she’ll overhear Martin Sixsmith talking about his career as a journalist, and where Jane broaches her mother’s past with him as a possible story. It’s good to see Anna Maxwell Martin on a cinema rather than a television screen – especially good to see her and Judi Dench working well together – but frustrating that Maxwell Martin is playing a character so minor that she’s entirely forgotten about once the main action is underway.
Yet Philomena turns into a good film. It tells an absorbing story, which turns out to be sadder and more shocking than I expected. I didn’t know that Anthony – or Michael Hess as he became, on his adoption by American parents, who paid the Catholic church in Ireland for the privilege – had died several years before Martin Sixsmith helped Philomena in her search for her son; or that, shortly before his death, Michael returned to the Roscrea convent in the hope of finding out how to contact his mother and was told by nuns there that she’d abandoned him and had no wish to see him again; or that, at Michael’s insistence, his remains were buried in the cemetery at Roscrea. Michael Hess became a senior (though very young) legal counsel in the Reagan and George Bush Sr administrations before his death from AIDS, in 1995, at the age of forty-three. I’d been taken in by the trailer for Philomena, which I’d seen several times, assuming from the snippet in which Martin Sixsmith tells Philomena that he met Michael at the White House that this had happened more or less in the present rather than many years ago. The film gets stronger not only because of these surprises but also because Coogan’s and Pope’s screenplay, though it’s structurally uninspired, contains plenty of witty, truthful dialogue, and builds convincingly the relationship between, and the characters of, Philomena and Sixsmith. There are no crude, obvious turning points in this relationship – or, at least, the writers and Stephen Frears’s skilful direction work the crucial moments into scenes that have already developed a textured credibility. The breakfast sequence in a Washington DC hotel, when Sixsmith and then Philomena discover that her son is dead, is the outstanding example of this.
What happened to Philomena and Anthony is presented as typical what happened at the time to unmarried, pregnant Irish girls and their illegitimate children. Philomena makes you feel enraged by this but is also honest enough to channel much of its condemnation of the scandal through Martin Sixsmith – in other words, through a character who’s fiercely bright but also angrily prejudiced. You sympathise with the loyally Catholic Philomena’s own anger when Sixsmith launches into a showoff, withering anti-religious riff – just as you share Sixsmith’s exasperation with her refusal to be too hard on what the nuns did. This is so much more effective than it would be if you sensed lofty moral censure on the part of the director – although Frears’s self-control slips a little in the climactic scene at Roscrea, when Sixsmith confronts the baleful Sister Hildegarde. As Sally said, Barbara Jefford is too animated in this small but key role: the moment when the ancient Hildegarde spits out her disgust at the ‘carnal incontinence’ of Philomena and her like would be more subtly incisive if the words issued more instinctively from the mouth of a virtually senile woman. But this would dilute the audience’s opportunity to condemn a baddie and there is another advantage to Jefford’s false dynamism: when Philomena says that she forgives Sister Hildegarde, the intervention has a more striking effect in shutting her up.
Judi Dench spoils you – there’s a serious risk of taking her for granted. She is completely truthful as Philomena – as amusing as she’s moving – but the tears in my eyes in the closing stages were at least partly to do with the fact that this great actress, seventy-nine next month, isn’t going to last forever. There are so many wonderful things in her performance – like the determined walk, made possible by Philomena’s recent hip replacement (‘It’s titanium, Martin, so it won’t rust’), and the way this naturally warm, friendly woman withdraws emotionally from Sixsmith, politely but decisively, as she gets out of his car and approaches the door of the convent. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone could have played the role better, especially because of the fine judgment needed to make many of Philomena’s lines funny without seeming to make fun of the woman. Judi Dench’s brilliant comic timing and unerring ability to inhabit the intelligence of the character she’s playing – and, here, to suggest that emotional acuity is as potent a kind of intelligence as any other – is a perfect combination. Dench’s career as an alchemist has now extended to converting the base metal of Steve Coogan into something of dramatic worth. You wouldn’t guess it from the conceited interviews he’s given about the film (which he also co-produced) but Coogan turns into someone different when he’s with Dench – not likeable but a proper actor. In Philomena, he draws on his own sarky unpleasantness in a way he couldn’t or wouldn’t do in What Maisie Knew – and creates a character other than himself. When Martin Sixsmith discovers that Philomena’s son is dead, Coogan expresses not only the man’s shock but also his fear that he’s not going to be able to respond to her grief, to be any comfort to her.
One of the most enjoyable bits in the film is when Philomena regales Sixsmith, as they’re travelling through an airport on a mobile conveyance (which makes her ‘feel like the Pope’), with the plot of the romantic novel she’s just finished reading. In the closing sequence, as they drive away from Roscrea, she embarks on telling him the plot of another. The reprise isn’t quite as good, partly because you recognise it as an attempt to repeat the magic of the first synopsis. You also wonder if it’s an evasive softening of the material – an attempt to make the audience feel, if not good, at least not as unhappy as the story of Philomena seems to dictate we should feel. On reflection, I think not. The ending serves to reinforce your admiration of Philomena’s good-humoured resilience – and of what it has to rise above.
6 November 2013