Four Stars

Last weekend I saw again the movie Philomena (streaming on Netflix). I liked it even better the second time around. The story is intriguing. Philomena Lee decides, 57 years after she gave her son up for adoption, that she will reveal this secret to her family and try to find him. Her daughter requests help from journalist Martin Sixsmith, and the search is on.

Philomena gave birth to her son at Sean Ross Abbey in Roscrea, Ireland, so that is their first stop. The nuns there assure her they have no information, and all records were destroyed in "the fire." Lee and Sixsmith then continue the search in the United States where they find more unexpected answers. Then the search concludes back at Sean Ross Abbey.

The actors are great with Judi Dench as Philomena and Steve Coogan as Sixsmith. Their chemistry together is an engaging, complicated mix of emotions. They don't learn what they set out to find but as their search progresses their goals change. That's the happy ending.

I agree with the New York Times reviewer Steven Holden who wrote of it, "so quietly moving that it feels lit from within." He also writes this:

Philomena has many facets. It is a comedic road movie, a detective story, an infuriated anticlerical screed, and an inquiry into faith and the limitations of reason, all rolled together. Fairly sophisticated about spiritual matters, it takes pains to distinguish faith from institutionalized piety. It also has a surprising political subtext in its comparison of the church’s oppression and punishment of unmarried sex ... with homophobia and the United States government’s reluctance to deal with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

Reviewer Justin Change does say “that much of the humor here comes at the expense of Dench's character,” and I agree that there are some scenes where Philomena appears a little silly, and I was sorry to see that. I was also sorry to see that the church and the nuns who operated the abbey showed another cruel and disappointing moment in Catholic Church history.