The Secret Scripture
Jim Sheridan (2016)
Twenty-odd years ago, Jim Sheridan made first-rate and lauded films in My Left Foot (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993) and, between them, the relatively unsuccessful The Field (1990). Sheridan was less productive in the years that followed but his next couple of features, The Boxer (1997) and In America (2003), both received some good notices and did decent box office. Of his three more recent movies, only Brothers (2009) has avoided a panning by reviewers. Having missed everything he’s made since In America, I wanted to see The Secret Scripture, though it was already clear this adaptation of Sebastian Barry’s 2008 novel of the same name wouldn’t be reviving the director’s critical or commercial fortunes. After premiering at TIFF last September, the film has just opened in the UK, in fewer cinemas than it has negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I was in Edinburgh for a few days and able to catch it in a Cineworld there.
The Secret Scripture is absorbing, even though it’s increasingly clear that it’s going wrong. If you’ve not read the novel, as I hadn’t, it’s not easy to be sure what’s going wrong but the film’s denouement is especially (and ludicrously) improbable. The central character is Roseanne (Rose) McNulty; the narrative moves between her present life and her distant youth. Octogenarian Rose (Vanessa Redgrave) has been a patient in St Malachy’s Asylum, a Sligo mental hospital, for some fifty years. The hospital and its inmates are about to move to new premises, though Rose is dead set against this. There are no extant records explaining the original admission of long-term patients and the hospital’s medical director (Adrian Dunbar) has asked a psychologist, William Grene (Eric Bana), to investigate Rose’s mental condition. The assignment involves conversations with her and reading the diary she’s kept throughout her time in St Malachy’s. The events leading to her hospitalisation are shown in a series of flashbacks to the early 1940s, when Rose (Rooney Mara) is in her twenties and, recently orphaned, comes from Northern Ireland to work for her aunt (Aisling O’Sullivan) in a small town in County Sligo. The flashbacks focus on Rose’s relationships with two young men, Michael McNulty (Jack Reynor), who has enlisted as a pilot in the RAF, and the parish priest, Fr Gaunt (Theo James), who, like Michael, is sexually attracted to her.
Because of his allegiance to the British war effort, the local IRA pursues Michael repeatedly; at Rose’s urging, he flees, never to be seen again, shortly after he and she have secretly married. Fr Gaunt’s thwarted desire for Rose leads to his recommending that she be placed in the asylum because of alleged nymphomaniac tendencies. Shortly after entering the hospital, Rose is found to be pregnant. There is speculation in the local community that she is carrying the priest’s child. In spite of her insistence that she’s married, she and her newborn son are placed temporarily, with single mothers and their illegitimate children, in the care of nuns. The set-up in the convent is similar to that described in Philomena; in order to prevent her baby being taken from her, Rose escapes with the child, runs to the seashore and hides in a cave off the Sligo coast. Fr Gaunt and two local men come after her in a boat. The upshot of this episode is that Rose returns to St Malachy’s accused not just of nymphomania but of infanticide too. She continues to believe, throughout her years in the asylum, that her son is alive – a delusion that’s assumed to be part of her mental illness. While he’s in Sligo, Dr Grene is also dealing with the estate of his recently deceased father. Grene discovers a letter from his father, which explains that William was raised by adoptive parents and that the adoption was arranged by Fr Gaunt. It turns out that Rose was right her child didn’t die. It also turns out that William is her long-lost son. In the film’s final scene, he and his mother leave St Malachy’s and he takes her home.
Although this ending is ridiculous, Jim Sheridan’s screenplay (developed from a script by the late Johnny Ferguson, who shares the writing credit) has sown – albeit contrivedly and somewhat confusingly – seeds of connection between Fr Gaunt and William Grene. Gaunt is in civvies when Rose first meets him among the Sligo sand dunes. When she asks what he does for a living he says, ‘I hear people’s problems’. ‘Are you a psychiatrist?’ replies Rose. This seems a very unlikely guess for an unsophisticated Irish girl to make in 1942; in any case, it’s no surprise to the viewer that, when we (and Rose) next see Gaunt, he’s wearing clerical garb. ‘And what’s your story, Dr Grene?’ asks the sympathetic St Malachy’s nurse (Susan Lynch), with whom he regularly talks as he learns more about Roseanne’s past. The nurse’s curiosity is understandable. William Grene is a solitary figure – he gives a priest-like impression of vocational dedication, even celibacy. His adoptive father’s letter tells William that Fr Gaunt, in later life, was ‘a deeply troubled man’ but that appears to reflect remorse for his dual betrayal of Rose rather than immediate responsibility for her baby. Unless I seriously misunderstood (always possible), William’s biological father is Michael McNulty.
There are plenty of things – major and minor – that don’t make sense. How does Fr Gaunt get back to dry land with Rose’s baby without the other men in the boat seeing this? The sequence during this episode that seems to show Rose using a rock to beat the baby to death feels a cheat: this didn’t actually happen – so in whose imagination is the ‘killing’ being seen? Since his parishioners are openly suspicious of his relationship with Rose, how does Fr Gaunt avoid professionally ruinous scandal? We learn that he went on to a successful career, eventually becoming an archbishop. This doesn’t work as an(other) illustration of how the Catholic church hushed up sexual offences by priests because the film, in over-dramatising Gaunt’s personal involvement with Rose, makes it very public – for example, he gets into fisticuffs outside a dance hall, with another of her local suitors (Aidan Turner). Michael’s plane crashes; Rose drags him from the wreckage and tends his wounds in their woodland hideaway: where does Michael get hold of a fresh uniform to change into once he’s ready to resume action? A close-up of an official missive concerning his military service reveals a remarkable goof: it’s World War II but the letter heading is ‘Her Majesty’s Forces’. Why can’t Rose prove to the authorities that she’s married? Her wedding to Michael, although none of their friends or family knew about it, is conducted by a priest and witnessed.
Against all this, the casting of The Secret Scripture is imaginative; Jim Sheridan’s direction of his actors is sure, if occasionally too deliberate; and most of the performances work well. As young Rose, Rooney Mara switches effectively between apparent indifference and flirty charm, and is powerful in the traumatic parts of the story. Although Mara doesn’t draw the viewer in, her opacity, in effect, helps get across the idea of a personality still developing – and thereby makes it more shocking that a young life has been stopped in its tracks. This also supplies a strong contrast with Vanessa Redgrave as the geriatric Rose, and reinforces our sense that this woman’s identity has been forged in St Malachy’s and tenaciously preserved there, through an act of will. Throughout her long career, Redgrave, as a screen presence, has often seemed a mixture of the luminous and the vaguely loony. This has sometimes been irritating but it’s just right for this role. Redgrave brilliantly suggests a woman on the cusp between confusion and concentration, whose mind is increasingly fragile but who is therefore trying all the harder to hold on to her memories and a sense of who she is.
Jack Reynor gives Michael an earthy, boyish charm that feels very right. As indicated above, Fr Gaunt’s personal involvement with Rose is over-dramatised and casting Theo James sounds like typical big-screen romanticisation – verging on Heathliffication – of a character. (Sebastian Barry’s Fr Gaunt, according to Rose, is ‘a little perky darting man … the crown of his head was at an equal level to my own. Bustling, spare and neat …’) Yet James’s good looks give the priest’s sexuality and struggle to subdue it a starker, more vivid quality than would have been likely with a less prepossessing figure in the role. This Fr Gaunt is darkly perturbed from an early stage; Theo James does a fine job of showing the curdling effects of his unshakeable carnal needs. Eric Bana too is a surprising, it might be thought too handsome, choice for William Grene but he’s admirably sensitive. Bana’s natural humour comes through well in William’s dynamic, comical impression, in a conversation with the nurse, of his uncommunicative (adoptive) father. This stays in your mind even before the additional impact it gains from William’s eventual realisation of what his father was trying to say. Susan Lynch also, through her distinctive beauty and her nuanced playing, gives human substance to the thin role of the nurse.
The actors aren’t the only strong points of The Secret Scripture. Jim Sheridan uses a simple visual device to realise the film’s name. During the opening titles, we see a bible open at the start of the Book of Job, which a pen amends to ‘Book of Rose’. Shots of Rose’s manuscript across the tops of pages in the bible recur regularly in what follows. The device is effective (even if these inscriptions are a drop in the ocean of her half-century of diary-keeping). Shortly after her admission to St Malachy’s, Rose is locked in a cell and a bible shoved through a slot in the door. Her life is wrecked by authorities religious and secular yet she puts to creative personal use the holy book that she receives in captivity. Sheridan’s images of Rose watching Michael’s plane in the sky work surprisingly well, thanks to their ambiguity, their blend of exhilaration and threat. The film’s score is by Brian Byrne. As piano music over the opening titles, it sounds crudely melodramatic at first. Once the camera reveals the old woman Rose playing it at the piano, however, Vanessa Redgrave’s attitude transmits to the music a quality of self-assertion that justifies its insistency and which resonates throughout with Rose’s determination to retain her individuality. The choice of music later in the story is less successful simply because it’s the Moonlight Sonata – plausible, of course, as a piece the promising pianist Rose might have learned to play but unavoidably clichéd as accompaniment to, and an expression of, her romance with Michael.
As I watched The Secret Scripture, I increasingly wondered if the fundamental problem was that Jim Sheridan was trying to wrench into the shape of a broadly realistic drama literary material of an essentially different kind. As impressive as Vanessa Redgrave is, it’s difficult to believe – against the physical reality of the hospital – that someone in Rose’s situation could actually resist institutionalisation to the extent that she does. Because I found the film as interesting as it was bewildering, I bought a copy of Sebastian Barry’s novel immediately after leaving the cinema and soon had my suspicions confirmed. In the book, Rose is as old as the twentieth century. Her life is a metaphor for being locked in the madhouse of contemporary Ireland, her victimhood the result of a pernicious interaction of the religious, political and social forces that governed the lives of women of Rose’s place and time. Sheridan has made huge changes to the original; as with the recent adaptation of the much slighter The Sense of an Ending, what remains doesn’t add up, largely because of what’s been jettisoned[1]. But I was glad to renew acquaintance with this director. I hope I’ll do better keeping in touch with him in future.
19 May 2017
[1] Postscript: The film’s incredible ending is faithful to Sebastian Barry, though. I have to confess it took me four weeks to get halfway through the novel, at which point I fast-forwarded to the last few pages then abandoned it. This is the story of a centenarian but life’s too short …