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Adapted
by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope from Martin
Sixsmith's 2009 book, The Lost Child of
Philomena Lee, Stephen Frears’ Philomena is the
story of an Irish woman who teams up with a
British journalist to look for the son she was
forced to give up fifty years earlier. It is
both a comic “buddy” road trip and a stinging
commentary on the practices of the Roman
Catholic Church in Ireland in the 1950s, though
the impact of its message about the inhumane
effects of religious dogma is undercut by its
feel-good banality. The fact that it hangs
together as well as it does is due to the superb
work of Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, the mother
seeking the truth about her son and Steve Coogan
as Martin Sixsmith, a cynical ex-BBC journalist
looking for a “human interest” story to restart
his flagging career. As
a teenager, Philomena (Sophie Kennedy Clark) had
an affair with a young man whom she had met
briefly at a county fair. Pregnant and rejected
by her family, she is sent to a church-run home
for unmarried pregnant women in Roscrea, County
Limerick in Ireland. Here she gives birth to a
son, Andrew, under the judgmental eyes of nuns
who attribute her pain in childbirth to God’s
wrath for her promiscuity. The young Philomena,
working long hours at the convent in what
amounted to slave labor, is allowed to spend
only one hour a day with her son. Sadly, when
the boy is three-years-old, he is “sold” under
his mother’s watchful eyes to an American couple
who make a large donation to the church, a
practice supported by the Irish government. On
Andrew’s birthday fifty years later, Philomena
reveals the story to her daughter Jane (Anna
Maxwell Martin), telling her that she knows
nothing about what has happened to him but
thinks about him every day. Philomena, however,
is introduced at a party to a journalist who had
just been fired from his job and who reluctantly
and with much sneering agrees to pursue
Philomena’s “human interest” story which he
pitches to a magazine editor. As Martin and
Philomena attempt to track down Anthony’s
whereabouts, a search that will bring them to
Washington, D.C., the film becomes less about
the investigation than about the interactions of
the unlikely duo. The
two do have a certain amount of charm together,
but the film unfortunately turns the sincere and
devoutly religious Philomena into an
unsophisticated middlebrow bumpkin who relates
in excruciating detail the plot of a romance
novel she is reading, loves movies such as Big
Momma’s House, and who, on visiting the Lincoln
Memorial declares “Look at him up there in his
big chair!” Though the film exploits her naivety
for laughs, she wins the day in the purity
department when contrasted with Martin, the
snarky, cynical Oxford graduate who calls the
nuns the "Sisters of Little Mercy," and uses
warped humor to assert his antagonism to all
religion.
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