THE MIRACLE CLUB - Mark Reviews Movies

The Miracle Club, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 13, 2023

At the heart of The Miracle Club is a lovely sentiment about finding faith, hope, and healing in each other, as opposed to waiting for and expecting that some unknowable higher power will provide what we want and need. That idea, as well as a noteworthy cast and some on-location filming in Lourdes, seems to be about as far as the filmmakers have decided to go with this material. The result is a genuinely pleasant but, more noticeably, wholly slight movie.

To be sure, there's plenty of potential, particularly in the collection of characters and actors that are assembled, here. Director Thaddeus O'Sullivan and the team of screenwriters, though, are in such a hurry to get to their ultimate point that it feel as if the movie is only scratching the surface of that potential.

The story begins in a small village in Ireland during the late 1960s. It's the sort of place where everybody knows everybody else's business but pretends to know a lot less than they do. That makes the gossip so much juicier, of course, and there's plenty of it to go around in this place, whether or not it really matters in any significant way.

Any sort of plot is nicely non-existent for the most part. The talk of the town at the moment is twofold. First is the death of a well-known and beloved woman, who did a lot of volunteer work for the local church—Catholic, naturally—and died just before the parish's talent competition, which she organized. Second is the competition itself, which boasts a second-place prize of a full ham.

As for the winner, the prize is a trip to Lourdes, the famous pilgrimage site in France where, according to legend, Mary, the mother of Jesus, appeared to a teenage girl in the mid-1800s. Since then, the site has become known as a place capable of miraculous healing.

Anyway, the story first revolves around a trio of local women of different generations. An elderly Lily (Maggie Smith) wants to see Lourdes, not for any kind of healing, but because she has always wanted to and knows she might not have another opportunity.

The couple-decades-younger Eileen (Kathy Bates) recently discovered a lump on her breast, and not wanting to see a doctor for all of the trouble and rumors it might cause, she hopes that those healing waters in Lourdes will stop the growth. Finally, 20-something mother-of-two Dolly (Agnes O'Casey) has been looking for an answer for how to get her son Daniel (Eric D. Smith) to begin speaking. A miracle seems to be the only solution.

The big to-do in town becomes the unexpected return of the dead woman's daughter Chrissie (Laura Linney) after a 40-year exile in Boston. There's a terrible secret, which isn't too difficult to determine, that caused her to leave and stay away all those decades, and with her arrival also returns all of the gossiping and judgment that caused her to abandon the village in the first place. Eileen, who's also Chrissie's cousin, does most of the talking behind the woman's back, and Lily, whose long-dead son was the third of a trio of friends with Chrissie and Eileen, can barely stand to look at her dead best friend's daughter.

Obviously, the four women, with the non-speaking kid and pastor Fr. Dermot (Mark O'Halloran) in tow, end up going to Lourdes together, talking around the reason for Chrissie's departure, and awaiting their turn to soak in the baths of the grotto where Mary supposedly appeared. As such, the screenplay—written by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager, and Jimmy Smallhorne—lets these characters stew in old griefs, resentments, and regrets in a way that would quickly become repetitive, if not for the fact that it's these actors doing the stewing.

Linney's character might be the central focus here, although that's mostly by default. Chrissie spends most of the movie, until she finally opens up about a couple pieces of information that everyone else already knows or suspects, looking at various people and scenes with a visage that suggests a lot of hidden pain. Linney offers much in those looks, though, just as Smith allows glimpses of a life's worth of guilt to show through Lily's stubborn attitude. Bates finds the balance in a tough act of making Eileen worthy of frustration and consideration, and O'Casey brings a sympathetic degree of anxiety and guilt to Dolly, whose character never fully fits into the story, except as a reason for it to happen in the first place, as someone who doesn't figure into the other characters' pasts.

Still, the movie does focus on those characters and, more importantly, these relationships, as they all start to realize that a divine solution to all their problems isn't forthcoming (It's a bit surprising that, considering the skepticism about the place for becoming a tourist attraction and in general, the filmmakers were able to shoot in Lourdes). It's refreshing and frank about the obvious limitations of faith and the possibility of people to find answers in themselves and others.

The Miracle Club, though, also becomes distracted by the sights and its own secrets—not to mention a subplot about helpless husbands at home. By the time these characters actually talk about what they need to talk about, the movie is basically finished with them.

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