Miracle Club Is a Celebration of Older Stars but It's a Fine Character Drama

Recent films like 80 for Brady and Book Club provide a joyous context with which to watch screen legends get meaty roles and have fun playing together. Who knew that, say, Jane Fonda and Mary Steenburgen, knew of each other, and liked acting alongside one another. Aww cute!

The downside is that because these are the filmic equivalent of reunion tours, these types of films (as well as Wild Hogs, Old Dogs, and Last Vegas on the male end) are devoid of conflict.

A couple of Maggie Smith films I’ve recently seen- Ladies in Lavender opposite Judi Dench, and The Miracle Club opposite Laura Linney and Kathy Bates – deal with meaty conflict. It’s a film about the aftermath abortion and Catholic guilt in Ireland. This is what almost every Irish film is about, minus the ones that are about the IRA and the civil war. Magdalene Sisters, Vera Drake, and Philomena are examples. In all seriousness, it was a pretty big tragedy (unless you’re a “Christian” blogger or a pandering right-wing lawmaker) wherein Irish society would often ship away pregnant unmarried women to convents to avoid family shame. The women would have the babies and give them up for adoption.

The film opens with Maggie Smith, Agnes O’Casey, and Kathy Bates (inexplicably sporting a full Irish brogue) as Irishwomen joyfully singing karaoke in what appears to be an Irish wake for their departed friend. The trio is taken aback when a stoic Laura Linney enters (thankfully not donning an Irish accent). She’s the daughter of the deceased and has been estranged for the past 40 years. She exchanges some terse words with Maggie Smith in a textbook case of passive-aggressive “I’ll pay for the funeral” ---- “No, I’ll pay for the funeral” one-upmanship.

We soon learn that Laura Linney was a teenage preggo who was sent to the States (thank god, because again, Linney didn’t have to do an accent), but the twist is that Maggie’s son was doing the impregnating. Maggie’s son was in love with her and wanted to follow Laura, but Maggie warned her it was a trap and Laura was just using her lady parts to ensnare him into a life of domesticity. Maggie’s son ended up living an unhappy life and committing suicide in guilt. In the interim, Agnes O’Casey, the youngest member of the karaoke trio, also has guilt of her own because she unsuccessfully tried to abort her baby in the bath tub and he survived but is developmentally disabled. So we got ourselves a double dramatic dose of abortion trauma.

One of the women has won a grand prize in a Church raffle for a vacation for four for some sort of spiritual spa in France. Nitpick time: Spas are spas and they rarely have a spiritual element to them. However, it does set the stage (albeit a little artificially) for a road trip element of reluctant bedfellows : If Laura stayed away for 40 years, you’d think she would never voluntarily spend time with her former best friend and the women who destroyed her true shot at love. But, the tickets were entered in the raffle before the death of Laura’s mom, and the priest (Irish stalwart Stephen Rhea) encourages Laura to redeem her mom’s ticket anyway. If you can get past both those dues-ex-machinas (oh yes, and Kathy Bates’ Irish accent), then that’s the most suspension of disbelief you’ll have to do.

The rest of the film is a well-developed relationship drama that skillfully confronts trauma and the culture’s changing social mores. The trailer advertises The Miracle Club as a feel-good film that might be indistinguishable from 2003's other "Old Stars Putting on a Last Hurrah" genre entries. But this is a film with dark spots that create a much richer sweetness at the end.

Note: The convention is to generally refer to characters in review by their character names and list actor names in parenthesis on first reference. I thought I'd try something different this time.



 

15 Actors Most Overdue for Oscar

1. Ralph Fiennes — Longtime cinephile's favorite online publication The Film Experience often refers to him as the best actor of his generation not to win. In addition to his two nominations in the 90s, he also was a great lead in another Best Picture nominee in Quiz Show. In the 00s, he garnered buzz in Constant Gardener, and the trifecta of Reader/In Bruges/Duchess (which might have split votes) in 2008, in addition to infusing one of the decade’s big franchises with Voldemort. He also got in on the Hannibal action in Red Dragon. In the 2010s, his output lessened. He likely was the most inventive Wes Anderson protagonist ever put to film in Grand Budapest Hotel (sorry Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore) and was quietly brilliant in The Dig a bit more recently.

2. Bradley Cooper -- While finishing a distant third in this past year's Oscar race, Cooper is well-known to have education bona fides (he went to an elite school) and to be a serious actor with a capital S. His streak of 3 straight nominations from 2012-2014 shows and 5 total shows that he's managed to break through at the top of wish lists by now. He’s getting so immersive (and possibly desperate) that he might pull a more extreme stunt like Revenant and get himself eaten by a bear.

3.  Paul Giamatti — I think the voters and media got a taste of how good the possibility of “And the Oscar Goes to Paul Giamatti” would have sounded. That he does not like a conventional leading man has worked in his favor as he is very much an ordinary man in the same way that Dustin Hoffman and Ernest Borgnine captured our imaginations.

4. Harvey Keitel — With luminaries like James Caan, Ned Beatty, and Danny Aiello tragically gone, he might be the last of the greatest generation of character actors who changed acting in the 1970s. Like Bill Nighy or Bruce Dern with recent norms, it might never be too late

5. Daniel Craig — Sean Connery won an Oscar for James Bond, but Craig had a far wider range and showed before and after Bond that he was willing to take risky roles, like Truman Capote’s lover in Infamous or a detective whose idiosyncrasies seemingly are modeled after Foghorn Leghorn. There are a ton of great roles in between in Craig’s filmography and his turns as Bond and LeBlanc make him a more marketable figure than, say, Colin Firth.

6. Johnny Depp — I’m not sure I’d cast him on a film because his drunken and difficult on-set behavior has become quite legendary (exacerbated through accounts at the Amber Heard trial), but to the degree that he would get cast, he’s never less than brilliant and superbly inventive. That can’t be denied.

7. Hugh Jackman — A convincing musical lead is hard to deny like his work in Les Miserables or Greatest Showman (a fan favorite, didn’t go so well with critics on the left). With his popularity with the Wolverine roles, and his range of work like The Front Runner or The Fountain, it’s not far-fetched at all that in a given year, he might have the best performance of the year. If it’s close, I have faith that the extremely amicable Jackman could get the award by doing well on the awards circuit

8. Benedict Cumberbatch — I tend to think best actors should be a little on the older side, and after Casey Affleck and Rami Malek, I’m happiest with actors winning the lead award over, say, 40, which is why Adam Driver seems a bit young for me (he’s 39, and nowhere near due). Cumberbatch might be there at 48. Damn, how the time has flown. He’s been superb in movies dating quite a while, and even if he doesn’t have a gazillion nominations, he does have an Emmy, and he’s the kind of guy you know could nail any future challenging role. He has been in 5 Best Picture nominees (War Horse, Imitation Game, 12 Years a Slave, Atonement, 1917), so his filmography is solid, even if his roles in a couple of his pictures were small.

9. Ed Norton — An actor’s actor, Norton has had some great break-out roles in the 90s, and has acted in a wide range (he even directed a romantic comedy). Motherless Brooklyn (his second directorial film) and his role in the Glass Onion show he’s still pretty ambitious.

10. Liam Neeson — His batting average of noticeable performance to regular performance is low considering how prolific he is, but he’s pretty beloved, and he has an excuse for acting in so many movies (it helps him get over his wife’s death). The probability that he has another brilliant performance like Kinsey or Schindler’s List shouldn’t be that far out of reach.

11. Eddie Murphy — The degree to which he held up SNL and the film industry in the 1980s can’t be underestimated. If you want to give a comic star an award, Murphy would be a good choice. The problem is that there isn’t that often a role like Dolemite is My Name or Dreamgirls.

12. Michael Fassbender — In 2011, he broke out with simultaneous plaudits for Shame, Dangerous Method, X-Men, and Jane Eyre all at once. He got two nominations in the next four years and I think he’s still growing strong. He’d be on the newer end of nominees.

13. Jon Hamm — The leading man on Mad Men fits the mold of a leading man very easily and I’m often thinking he’d be a good lead whenever I armchair cast a film idea I think of in my head.

14. Steve Martin — Hard to think of a more beloved legend in comedy. Roles like 2005’s Shopgirl show he can do something big if he gets the right role. He’s retiring soon, so he can market such a win as his swan song.

15. Richard Gere — This 75-year-old actor has had roles in key films in the 1970s (Days of Heaven), 1980s (Officer and a Gentleman), 1990s (Pretty Woman, Primal Fear), 2000s (Unfaithful, Chicago, Amelia), and 2010s (Arbitrage). He’s never been the preeminent of his generation and he’s never had the hot streak of a lot of great movies in a row, but his filmography stretches back a ways. With a good role, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be cheered as a consummate screen icon.

Movie Dialogue: Poor Things

 I have rich conversations about films every day. I figure today, I can just transpose one of them word for word here. I haven't yet checked with the friend over permission to use her name, so I'll just label her as friend. We used to write for the same publication.

Friend: Well, I watched Poor Things

Me: What'd you think?

Friend: I was disappointed

Me: Why?

Friend: It was too male gazey. Like some things shouldn't be lamp shaded.

Me: It definitely felt extremely voyeuristic. What did you mean by lamp shading

Friend: Like, it's bad these men want to exploit the "women-child" and then the director show it gratuitously. Basically, when a director or narrative says "I know I'm doing this thing, I am calling attention to it so we all know it's happening", that still doesn't chance that he's gratuitous.

Me: I can see that. I think it helps that Emma Stone was very enthusiastic about this acting exploration and seemed to be working with the director on this vision from interviews I've heard. Some guy I don't much care for said I don't trust straight males to shoot those scenes, and that's just plain discriminatory and disenfranchises the women and others who might have also been a partner in the art.

Friend: I think they could have gotten the poihnt across with much less gratuity. Sure, but women can be complicit in these things. I'm not erasing her involvement! She was there!

Me: And Emma hasn't historically been a nymphomaniac who loves to bear all in movies. I'd read interviews with her, she loved the acting challenge. I found Willem DeFoe's face and the metal bubbles he formed to be the grossest part.

Friend: No issues with her acting. She was very good, as was Ruffalo and the others. See, I'm usually worse with body horror but it wasn't that bad for me.

Me: What did you think of Ramy Yousef's attraction to her?

Friend: It was the most honest

Me: Do you think it was pedophilia? I thought it was shallow at the very least. But yeah, he was a good guy

Friend: Still gross. And he recognized that it was wrong.

Me: At the start of the movie, when he said he was in love with her or attracted to her. I was like "she has the IQ of a lower level primate." How can you be attracted to her other than her looks?

Friend: Yeah exactly. But that's like The Fifth Element or Splash or any of those born sexy yesterday movies. It's a squicky trope.

Me: So maybe he's insincere when he's like "I'm in love with her." Oooohhh, good connection!

Friend: But I liked that he seemed almost relieved at the end. Like, oh good, she's caught up. And he was happy to go along with whatever she wanted.

Me: I mean, I think if the movie has its disturbing elements, it's also what I'm looking for. I think the movie is a think-y one where we can debate a lot.

Friend: Yeah, like honestly removing the sex scenes would have made it a Top Ten for me, easy. Maybe even my fave of the year. And I'm not a prude, honestly!

Me: And it had some very funny moments. I loved the scene where Mark Ruffalo tried to push that woman off the edge of the ship. Whoever that actress was, who was just humorously going along with the man wanting to kill her, she was so enchanting.

Friend: Yes, the whole boat sequence was great. I think the Alexandria bit was too short though. I like that the movie (and book, I suppose) could have gone in such a different direction.

Me: I didn't like that element, because the shot of Alexandria was so CGI-heavy. Aesthetically, that was a part of the movie that took me out of it a lot.

Friend: I can see that. I mean more about what it was trying to say.

Me: How so?

Friend: Rich people are self-centered and they just throw money at poor people and then don't think about it anymore, like "my work here is done."

Me: And it was imperfect? I think that's where the film is great because it leaves room for debate. There is tremendous thematic depth over how to grow, how to be happy, how to give. You have to give credit for the film for being thematically ambitious. I think the film was also largely positive about prostitution, she was in control of the situations, she was voluntarily there, and learning and empowering herself from it.

Friend: I do appreciate the presentation of sex work and the reclamation of power in that regard.

Me: It's a rosy picture of prostitution outside of, say, Amsterdam. I'm curious if it's an overly rosy picture of prostitution in the period in which the film was taking place.

Friend: Thematically again very rich, but I think undermined itself with the gratuity and graphicness of the sex. Even if it had saved all the sex until that prostitution sequence, that would have been better.

Me: I agree a little too. I thought some of the sex was gross but I also heard it was supposed to be gross and unglamorous.

What I'm Watching Spring '24 Part 1: Manhunt, Irreverent, Tourist, Clone High, Resident Alien

Manhunt (Apple)-First Two Episodes-Living in DC, it's extremely exciting to see this story dramatized as I've interacted with Ford's Theater and landmarks involving Samuel Mudd, Mary Surratt, and John Wilkes Booth. It's very much living history here as park rangers at Ford's Theater have held opposing views on different tours I've been on as to the guilt of Samuel Mudd. Through two episodes, it's solid although a little crusty like a standard period piece. The ensemble might be a little too overloaded with parts for clarity and it's a disservice to the story that Seward's assassination attempt is given such short shrift. Also, Patton Oswalt is so goddamn funny in everything that it's hard to take him in a serious role.

The Tourist (Netflix)-Season 1-A version of Memento set in the Australian outback with an Irishman (Jamie Doorman) who awakens in an Australian hospital without his memory, an eager-beaver cop lady on the bottom of the totem pool, a steamy former lover as a sidekick, and a wonderfully idiosyncratic hitman (Olaffur Dari Olaffson, an THE Icelandic emblem). It's set up to be a black comedy and things get intriguing until the penultimate episode of the first season when it gets to be reality-bending. I'll just say that narrative threads that are coherent from start to finish are more my cup of tea. The final episode in the 6-episode run not only gets the train back on the tracks, but adds new elements to the mix: A character improbably dies, two characters learn to not suck at their jobs, a new romance is teased, an abusive relationship ends. I won't spoil which character fits into which box in the previous sentence, but I'm excited for season 2.

*SEASON 2 JUST RELEASED THIS PAST MONTH*

Irreverent (Peacock)-Season 1- Like The Tourist, this is set in Australia with a fish-out-of-water plot. A drifter with mob affiliations steals the mob's money and runs off to Australia. He is improbably burglarized by a pastor sitting next to him on a flight who treads the fine line between friendly and nosy (incomparable character actor PJ Byrne). The pastor is an oddity in that he did one horrible thing (stole a man's life and identity) and is a man of the cloth, but seems oddly blase about it. However, there's no other way to drive the plot forward so I'll allow it.

For his part, the criminal learns to adapt and eventually comes to terms that the money might not be coming in a cross between Waiting for Godot and Doc Hollywood (this small Australia town is populated by charmingly provincial people). There's a quiet sense of profundity in its short run. More importantly, there's an escalation of events and a palpable sense of danger, is gripping enough for a good binge.

Clone High (HBO Max)-Season 3-Clone High is a paradox in that it's a relic from an age with lax PC limitations, and that the show is built around mocking some pretty sacred cows. The show was cancelled, before the age of cancel culture, in the early 2000s by a pretty extreme act: Members of India's parliament staged a hunger strike over the depiction of Gandhi (one they heard about second-hand through a magazine) while Indian citizens staged a threatening protest outside Viacom's Indian headquarters. So they pulled Gandhi. Considering how strongly that demographic spoke, and how little they usually protest, I think it's not cowardly at all to pull Gandhi. But the problem is that nearly every character -- Cleopatra, JFK (who has living relatives), Harriett Tubman, Frida Kahlo, Confucious, Jesus, the Buddha, Christopher Columbus, Catherine the Great, Betsy Ross -- is extremely likely to offend someone.

As a result, it feels like they toned down everyone's outrageousness and that neutered the show substantially. Three of the four new characters are personality-less, the remaining one (Topher Bus) has some funny beats but he's underused, and Cleopatra is reduced to being arm candy to Frida. I don't mind JFK reforming to be less of a jerk, but he objectively has fewer funny lines, and he's far more subservient to JFK in an unconvincing friendships.

It's base level is so funny, that I'd hardly stop watching, but the new characters of Season 2 added nothing. Season 3 does boast a few positives. While the rotating door of relationships dilutes the popular kids' affections, the bleacher creatures (clones of historic villains apparently make great actors) are a true delight. Season 3 also has a great villain in Bloody Mary as a manic pixie dream girl (lamp shaded heavily), and Candide and Scudworth solidify semi-evil schemes of their own.

Resident Alien (SyFy)-Season 4- Loving this, although the hierarchy between Harry and Linda Hamilton's organization remains a little unclear, and Ben being abducted seems to really throw one too many wrenches in the fire. I'm loving the further involvement of D'Arcy in the plot.