FILM
HARRY MOUNT
THE MIRACLE CLUB (12A)
The immortal Alan Partridge once listed the great clichés about Ireland: ‘Leprechauns, shamrock, Guinness, horses running through council estates, toothless simpletons, people with eyebrows on their cheeks… men in platform shoes being arrested for bombings, lots of rocks and Beamish.’
Well, he could have added eccentric, old, devout biddies who mix outspoken truths with doses of charming blarney – viz viz Mrs Doyle in Father Ted.
There are plenty of Mrs Doyles in The Miracle Club (released on 29th September), even if they are played by actresses as magnificent as Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates.
It's 1967 in Ballygar, on the outskirts of Dublin, and Lily Fox (Smith) and Eileen Dunne (Bates) are embarking on a coach trip to Lourdes.
It isn't expressly said but everyone on the bus is in search of a miracle at the holy shrine. The – again unexpressed – schmaltzy message of the film is that they all witness less dramatic, everyday miracles of the sort we should all be grateful for.
So, Lily is seeking some way out of the agony of losing her son, then 19, 40 years earlier, in 1927. That agony is intensified by another passenger on the bus, Chrissie Ahearne (Laura Linney), an American outsider, who had been pregnant with Lily's son's child but bolted – for reasons that would give away the plot.
Eileen is looking for some escape from illness and the relentless grind of impoverished domestic life – and her unhelpful husband (a heroically slobbish, self-pitying Stephen Rea).
It's very nearly the heartwarming film it's trying to be. Smith is, as ever, a natural, her pitch-perfect accent never slipping into Oirish. How unvain she is – as she exposes plenty of naked, wrinkled, 88-year-old flesh when she enters the sacred waters at Lourdes.
At times, Smith resembles the late, great Charles Hawtrey – and she matches his comic gifts in her ability to raise laughs from the slightly pedestrian script (by Joshua D Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne). She deploys her billiard-ball eyes as adeptly for comedy as for heart-stirring tear-jerking at the film's happy dénouement.
Bates, too, nails the accent and gives an understated picture of the exhausted wife and mother at the end of her tether.
And does anyone do quiet sadness better than Linney?
The film is well-structured by director Thaddeus O'Sullivan over its 90 minutes – the ideal length for a proper plot with zero flabby self-indulgence. The religious aspects are subtly delivered – no mocking jokes; no preaching.
