There’s just one dream for the women of Ballygar to taste freedom: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes.
I can’t quite believe I’m not enthralled by a film featuring Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, and, most of all, Maggie Smith. Set in the town of Ballygar, Ireland, in 1967, the plot line is older than I am. Three main characters, Smith’s Lily, Bates’s Eileen, and the youngest housewife, Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), are burdened by husbands who don’t understand or appreciate them. In fact, the husbands are inserted as just stock characters in the story. They are Every Husbands, buffoons who struggle through the day when they find themselves alone with no wife to cook, shop or diaper the baby.
The beginning of the film is confusing. I had no idea where we were headed, and it’s not until the talent (?) shows at the local Catholic church that the plot line slowly shoves off. And it takes a bit too long to get in gear. That happens at the church talent show, where three of the women, Lily, Eileen, and Dolly, find themselves set to achieve their dream of traveling to Lourdes, France. There and, apparently only there, they will find the personal miracle that will bring them the desperately needed healing. Strangely, the writers then add Linney’s character, Chrissie, who is absent some forty years from her hometown. She is returning for her estranged mother’s funeral and is at sixes and sevens immediately with Lily and Eileen for unnamed transgressions from the past. Given that information, it is difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend why she would choose to join the bus trip to France. In fact, it mysteriously seems as if Chrissie goes out of her way to follow and almost stalk Lily and Eileen. They don’t want her around, yet she ends up sharing a bed with Lily at the hotel where the church group is staying in Lourdes. Yes. Really. Seriously. I couldn’t shed the impression of Chrissie as the guardian angel, coming from afar and pressing these friends of her dead mother to confront and reckon with their repressed anger and hurt. But that idea doesn’t float, considering Chrissie has her own past hurts to consider.
I should mention that Dolly, played by Agnes O’Casey (a great-granddaughter of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey), is an outsider to this foursome. She’s a Ballygar housewife with two small children and years younger than the other three. However, she searches for a miracle for her son, who doesn’t speak, and her character provides relief from the prickly interactions of Chrissie, Lily, and Eileen.
I guess “The Miracle Club” could be considered a feel-good tale. It tries to be funny in tired old ways that aren’t so funny, while the story is too shallow, superficial, and predictable to afford any honest look at the source of all miracles – the heart and mind of each individual. When I worked as a counselor in high school and junior high school, I found a “magic wand” at a dollar store where I lived. It was pink plastic with a heart at one end and a button I could press that made it tingle a lilting riff. I always had it in my office and would bring it out when a student complained there was no possible solution to their problem. It would take a MIRACLE! I would tap them softly with my wand and suggest their problem was solved. I wanted to suggest that the miracle was not to be found outside of them but in their own mind and heart.
Bottom line? Miracles don’t come as easy as a magic wand. A miracle takes work, but not if you’re in “The Miracle Club,” apparently.
The film opens theatrically in the DFW area Friday, July 14th
