A blessed cast in a gentle tale of miracles
Laura Linney and Maggie Smith shine in this new Irish-made film from Thaddeus O’Sullivan
The Miracle Club (12A, 90 mins) Verdict: A minor miracle ★★★☆☆
WE’RE in Dublin in 1967, and Chrissie Ahearn (Laura Linney) has arrived back home from the United States after 40 years away, to bury her estranged mother, Maureen (voiced by Brenda Fricker in the form of a letter).
The welcome she receives from the residents of their terraced hones is tepid bordering on hostile, including from her old but equally estranged friend Eileen Dunne (Kathy Bates), and from Lily Fox (Maggie Smith), mother of Chrissie’s teenage sweetheart who drowned in the sea at the South Wall.
Only the much younger Dolly Hennessy (Agnes O’Casey) makes any effort to befriend Chrissie when they meet at a charity talent competition to fund the parish pilgrimage to Lourdes. There is a prize on offer of two tickets to join the trip to France (‘second prize is a bacon joint,’ says Mark O’Halloran’s well-meaning Fr Dermot Byrne in the film’s funniest line), and Dolly is desperate to win it, so she can take her non-verbal son Daniel to the baths in the hope this might help him speak.
Eileen and Lily already are booked on the trip, the former optimistic it will cure a lump she has found in her breast, the latter seeking redemption for an act of cruelty decades before that links all the women together.
There is initial irritation when Chrissie takes her late mother’s place on the bus, but her presence proves to be the key that unlocks years of buried secrets made public by Eileen after she drinks a little too much French wine.
How it all is resolved has all the feel of a Maeve Binchy novel, with every circle squared by the time the bus pulls back into Ballygar a week later (that lovely terraced-house square beside Blackrock Park, and just opposite the clinic, has a starring role).
It is a slight tale, and told in an old-fashioned style by director Thaddeus O’Sullivan, the very opposite of his work on RTÉ’s punchy and often violent series, Hidden Assets. This is a world in which doubts about faith are rooted in personal experience, and not a consequence of scandals that later emerged.
Where the story occasionally lack pace, the performances more than compensate. Smith, as ever, is a wonder, and while Bates’s accent goes on a little pilgrimage of its own to every corner of this island and beyond, her undoubted resilience and charm carry the day. Linney, oddly, is given the most thankless role, so it’s left to O’Casey (whose great-grandfather, playwright Sean, undoubtedly would have written the story in grittier style) to carry many scenes, which she does with ease even when up against the Oscar winners in the cast.
Back home, the men get thankless roles — Stephen Rea as Eileen’s lazy husband, Niall Buggy as Lily’s, and Mark McKenna as the controlling husband of Dolly (he has grown up a lot since he played boyband member Eamon in Sing Street).
Needless to say, everything comes good in the end – as Fr Dermot tells Eileen, the real miracle is pushing ahead, even when the expected immediate cure doesn’t happen.
It is a far better movie than The Secret Scripture, which dealt with some similar themes, and mostly avoids the clichés of Oirishness and Catholicism you might expect, but it nonetheless plays out a bit like a Hallmark movie that keeps sentimentality just a hair’s breadth on the right side of mawkishness. An audience of a certain vintage will, however, find much to enjoy here.
PHILIP NOLAN
O THE 67th London Film Festival ends this weekend not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a squawk.
Among the concluding treats is tomorrow’s world premiere of the Chicken Run sequel, the gloriously titled Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget. My review will have to wait until next week, but I have already seen it and can report that the clever folk at stop-motion studio Aardman have struck golden corn again. It’s wonderful.
Of the films already unveiled, I loved The Bikeriders ())))), 116 mins, release date December 1), an absorbing drama with echoes of great mob pictures such as Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, except that the mob depicted here is a motorbike club in late-1960s Chicago. They call themselves The Vandals.
Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy and Austin Butler lead a terrific cast, but most of the plaudits belong to writer-director Jeff Nichols, whose last picture, 2016’s Loving, also delved into 1960s America, telling the true story of a couple whose interracial marriage fell foul of Virginia’s grotesque anti-miscegenation laws.
Yet race scarcely features in this film, a fictional (and, be warned, often violent) tale dreamt up by Nichols after he became fascinated by the striking black-and-white images of bikers and their girls in a 1968 book by photo-journalist Danny Lyon. With Mike Faist playing Lyon, the story springs episodically
from his interviews with biker’s ‘moll’ Kathy (Jodie Comer, the brilliant Liverpudlian actress here talking in an accent that might have been hauled from the depths of Lake Michigan).
SHE recalls how The Vandals got started, how they expanded into other US cities, and how their found and leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy). maintained his supremacy. ‘Fists or
knives,’ he says almost wearily, whenever anyone challenges him.
Kathy’s recollections are strongly reminiscent of the voiceover device provided by Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas. Indeed, I was reminded again and again not just of that masterpiece, but also The Godfather trilogy and TV hit The Sopranos, for this is a story of hard men functioning outside normal society in their own sub-culture, governed by their own laws.
As in those mob narratives they are rogues and rascals, yet we find ourselves rooting for them, especially in the case of Kathy’s ineffably cool, incomparably laid-back, infuriatingly laconic husband Benny (Austin Butler), to whom Johnny, who regards him as a son, wishes to pass his crown.
By the way, you don’t need to love motorbikes to love this film, which is just as well, as I for one barely know a Harley-Davidson from Jim Davidson. But it helps to love 1960s music. The soundtrack, featuring Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and The ShangriLas among many others, is magnificent.
I liked the Festival’s opening film Saltburn ()))**, 127 mins, November 17), but not quite as much as I was hoping to. The second feature from writer-director Emerald Fennell (after 2020’s well-received Promising Young Woman), it stars Barry Keoghan as first-year Oxford undergraduate Oliver Quick, whose own apparently deprived background on Merseyside helps to fuel his infatuation with rich fellow student Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).
Fennell has oodles of fun satirising her own hugely privileged upbringing, and there are some priceless moments when Oliver is invited back to the Catton family pile, with Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike as Felix’s parents Sir James and Lady Elspeth (‘Darling, where’s Liverpool?’), and Carey Mulligan as family friend ‘poor dear’ Pamela, all thoroughly enjoying themselves.
But what begins as an amusing tragi-comedy of manners lurches a little uneasily into something much darker: a psycho-sexual thriller that rather shamelessly flaunts its inspirations — among them Brideshead Revisited, The Talented Mr Ripley and Kind Hearts And Coronets.
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers ())))*, 133 mins, January 19) is another story of privilege. It’s set in 1970 in a boys’ boarding school in New England where, over the Christmas holidays, crusty classics teacher Mr Hunham (the brilliant Paul Giamatti) gets the unenviable job of supervising the ‘holdovers’, the lads who for whatever reason can’t go home. Eventually, he is left with only one holdover, the smart but sullen Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa, also excellent), which develops into a curious menage-a-trois: world-weary teacher, recalcitrant pupil and African-American school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), trying to contain her grief following her only son’s death in Vietnam.
This might not sound like a recipe for comedy, but then Payne could find the humour in a wet flannel. The laughs are carried along, though, by a strong undercurrent of sadness as this trio of misfits try to find their way. It’s a tremendously poignant story, beautifully presented in muted colours and a grainy texture, as if to give the impression that it was made at the time it is set.