Philomena

Grade: B

Somehow, I’d never heard the story of Philomena Lee until I saw the recent film directed by Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, The Grifters, Dangerous Liasons) and starring Judi Dench. The plot involves a journalist who finds himself doing a human interest story about a woman who searches for her long lost son, shortly after what would be his 50th birthday. The woman, Philomena, became pregnant as a teenager, and while living in a convent, watches as the Catholics take the boy away to live in America. No goodbyes. As the title character, this is the most vulnerable, naive, and light-hearted I’ve ever seen Dench. I always associated her with the hard-asses she played in Shakespeare in Love, the James Bond movies, or [if you want to go old-school] Titania in Midsummer. Also very effective here is her co-star Steve Coogan as the journalist. Despite the heavy plot, Philomena is surprisingly comic, with a through-line of sarcastic humor and one-liners. After a first two-thirds where it trucks along somewhat predictably, the last half hour is filled with several bursts of fascinating discoveries which “brought up a lot for me,” to quote an instructor at a theatre I apprenticed at. It’s uneven, having all these cans of worms opened only in the final act, but I can’t deny that it ends interestingly. Because of this, it was a hard movie for me to score. I debated between two grades in my head, and ultimately went with the lower one.

Grade: B