There’s a little Irish film out this week that harks back to a faith-based Hollywood film from a more innocent time - The Song of Bernadette.
The story of the young girl whose visions turned the little French town of Lourdes into a Catholic pilgrimage site opened with the famous line “For those who believe, no explanation is necessary, for those who don’t, no explanation is sufficient.”
Photo: Zephyr Films
Listen
The low budget The Miracle Club has a surprisingly star-studded cast; Laura Linney, Steven Reay, Kathy Bates and Dame Maggie Smith.
The story opens with Kathy, Maggie and their young friend Dolly entering a singing competition – first prize a trip to Lourdes.
Dolly’s young son Daniel can’t or won’t speak. What she needs is a miracle.
There seem to be only two tickets on offer in the competition, but you can rest assured there’ll end up being enough to allow everyone to get on the bus in time.
As always in this sort of fillum, there have to be four women, and here comes Number Four of the Miracle Club – Chrissie played by Laura Linney.
Linney is one of America’s finest actresses. The fact that she was terrific in Love Actually should give you some idea of her skills.
She’s equally good here, playing a woman who left the village under a mysterious cloud, and only came back for her mother’s funeral.
Chrissie, and Lily and Eileen – Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates – clearly have history. And despite the best efforts of lovable Father Dermott, any chance of reconciliation…. Well, frankly it’s going to take a miracle.
While we struggle to think how the plot is going to push this along, the three erstwhile Miracles are farewelling those useless Sixties husbands of theirs, before anything goes wrong.
Then it’s all on the bus – Lily and Eileen, Chrissie waving her late mother’s ticket to Lourdes – and finally at the last minute, Dolly and young Daniel. Next stop, St Bernadette’s grotto.
You probably didn’t need to be told that, aside from young, silent Daniel, everyone else on the bus is praying for their own particular miracle.
Though, as is the way in films like this, what they think they want isn’t necessarily what they’ll get - or even what they need.
Now, speaking as a member of the more sceptical half of the Song of Bernadette audience, my interest in Lourdes was driven more by curiosity than based on faith.
This is clearly a story for a Catholic audience, but not exclusively. It’s rather better than I was expecting, with that added value that great actors can slip into a script when it’s not looking.
Bates, Smith and Linney aren’t the sort of performers to simply phone it in, assuming their fans will come along anyway.
There are secrets and lies – the back-story of Chrissie’s ignominious exit from the village all those years ago is the one that elicits both guilt and forgiveness before the end.
And there are lovely performances by relative unknown Agnes O’Casey as Dolly and young Eric Smith as the silent Daniel.
Are they enough to forgive the flagrant sentimentality The Miracle Club often slips into, or the broad Irish clowning of the dopey husbands?
Call me a cockeyed optimist, or a self-hating agnostic, but at the end I almost think they are.