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.



 

Bottom Ten Films of 2023 To Date

 10. Book Club Chapter 2-It’s another edition of “hey, Old people are exciting too!” I wonder if someone like Jane Fonda who has 2 Oscars and 5 additional nominations looks down on co-stars like Lily Tomlin or Don Johnson who have zero. Anywho, there’s not much to cover here: A bunch of old people having fun and negotiation late-stage romance and friendship. And a decent amount of scenery porn. Also, Mary Steenburgen playing the accordion (again).

9. White Men Can’t Jump-Jack Harlow didn’t convince me that he could jump. I’m not sure if he was slacking off with the training for the role, or I don’t know my basketball, but I wasn’t particularly convinced with the action here. Or maybe white men can’t jump. I was kind of expecting a more racially woke take on the original, but planned on watching anyway for nostalgic purposes. I was pleasantly surprised that the film doesn’t avoid edgy dialogue and doesn’t subdue one story in service to lionization of the Black character. Still, it wasn’t as exciting as it appeared to have been on paper.

8. Super Mario Brothers- This animated movie isn’t just a filmic homage to the Super Mario Brothers game you grew up with as a kid; it’s hodgepodge of every video game with the Super Mario label. Kind of like Ready Player One except there’s thematic consistency. And that nostalgia factor lights a bulb in your brain. And talk about that score! It’s almost worth the price of admission to see the most memorable tunes of the early 90s outside of the Billboard top 40, to be put to orchestration. As for the story, it’s pretty typical but not lazy enough (from an adult perspective) to have made a negative viewing experience for me.

7. Missing-A moderately clever thriller for the zoom age. Wish I had more to say.

6. No Hard Feelings-Basically, Lauren Benanti and Matthew Broderick hire a cash-strapped Jennifer Lawrence as a prostitute for their son, but Jennifer Lawrence doesn't consider herself a whore so it's not so bad. The kid is supposedly really awkward and insular (it turns out he has trauama), but then again he has at least two friends and he's going to Princeton where being a socially awkward genius is probably seen as a plus. Jennifer tries to sex him up as fast as possible so she can cash in, but hilarious misunderstandings (like an old friend wanting to have sex with him, which would solve his parents' problem) get in the way. Along the way, they become friends (aww, how cute) even though she's charging at him like a bull in heat. Then he finds out she was paid off, and has sex with her anyway (clumsily, is that supposed to be funny) while also destroying her car (taking away any semblance of him as a noble character), but then they heal each other's wounds (I think?).

Almost nothing in the plot holds up, but you get the idea that it's not supposed to: It's about the R-rated raunch but all that means is that Jennifer Lawrence is naked a little (I guess Seth MacFarlane can claim victory in the 2012 Oscars) but it doesn't leave that level of no-holds-barred usurping of appropriateness like Bridesmaids or The Hangover. If you're not going to do that, try building a better plot next time.

5. Elemental-Three main thoughts: 1) The level of world-building and visual imagination deserves great credit. 2) The love story is really sappy and overwrought 3) Is Pixar under so much pressure to be diverse that they’re afraid to cast a white person in what is clearly a metaphor for interracial romance?

4. True Spirit-It’s an inspiring adventure/sports story of someone who did something that people said she couldn’t. And it’s a teenager. And it stares an Oscar winner in Anna Paquin. But extremely snooze-worthy.

3. Beau is Afraid-The film’s marketing describes the movie as about a lonely man’s odyssey home, and the director described it as a “nightmare comedy” on press tours. I would classify it as the kind of ride that amusement park’s convert into a haunt-fest for Halloween. Only it lasts three hours, and it was seemingly co-written by Carl Jung and Franz Kafka for maximum symbolism. Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely man who’s ill-at-ease with the world. It’s kind of justified, however, because, he seems to live among the worst possible humans alive. It’s disturbing but not tremendously far away from working.

2. Ghosted-It might have been less this film, than where I was this genre in general—action hero casually murders tons of people while being immune from even a single bullet—that colored my opinion. It’s a good turn for Ana de Armas.

1. Asterisk and Obelisk-Sure, there are works that are kid-oriented but there should be some appeal to an adult audience in terms of presenting a good story. I can appreciate that it was adapted from a comic book, but the film had a weird and off-putting ascetic. The fight scenes were just plain lazy.