Philomena

Oh man this was a strange one, it's the most middle-class film I've seen in the longest time but it stirred some strange emotions within me, worryingly not all of them were good, not in a, 'Oh that's sad.' sensation as I do like that, but it was more indignant, anger, it kind of curdled what was a pleasant film.

First and first most, I have endless respect for Steve Coogan, I think he's an excellent talented man and I love this film for many reasons, but there are some aspects I understand that were emphasised for dramatic purposes; it's based off the real life story of Philomena Lee and her search for her son with the help of Henry Sixsmith. I get it, lord do I get the importance of making a movie of real life more enthralling than the rigours of reality, the joy of Philomena is that it does quite wonderfully with broad strokes even if some of them feel a little bit cheap.

I highly doubt anyone else in the whole world could have brought as much warmth and joy to a character as Judi Dench, the film essentially hinges on her being wholly sympathetic and she manages it so well even whilst she is clearly grappling with some difficult emotions. But hell, you can't just go about giving Judi Dench all the awards all the time, it just wouldn't be fair on anyone else. In my head though I just kept thinking of her most recent high profile role, M in the James Bond series, it was boggling my mind, 'It's the same woman!' That badass who wouldn't take non of Bond's shit is now reciting the plot to what I can only assume is the latest Mills & Boon, I can't say I wouldn't love to listen to her doing that all day, it's strangely pleasant, plus she sounds so thrilled by the formulaic twists. Now some would say that they are simply using Philomena's naivete at her expense but I think it was just a neat way of depicting how she still finds joy in the world even at her age, and it's there to be a stark comparison to Sixsmith who is essentially a dick-head throughout most of the film with flashes of humanity; I'll let him off, after all he is the catalyst for all this. Speaking of which, it's probably unpopular opinion but this is my favourite of Coogan's performances in a long time (yup that includes Alan Partride) mostly because he manages to make me feel sympathetic for his character, only slightly but it's there, he has good intentions, he just has a few bad habits which middle-aged upper middle class British men seem to all have imbued within them - this doesn't make him a stereotype, it makes him familiar. Plus the film makes a great attempt at putting the two at odds with eachother teasing the best out of them and acknowledging their wholly human frailties. It's a lovely character piece to say the least and it moves along at a healthy clip managing to be both time efficient and heart warming, what more could you want?

Where the film inevitably falls down is it's handling of religion. Oh yes, that hot topic, the one that most people as far I'm aware, in our civilised clued up land of post-modernity, acknowledge as archaic and unimportant in the world, the vestige of a world of thought long extinct. Yet of course religion is the driving force behind some of the worst sins in this world, the hypocrisy of the Catholic church and it's clergy, the assumption that Muslims are all suicide bombers, fanatics who use the Qu'ran to legitimise their violence, the use of the Christian Bibles to prevent women from civil rights such as abortion and birth control,  people thanking God for their good fortune and blaming the same power for destruction and pain in this world. Atheism is as much a religion as anything else if you are to believe Dawkins and his ilk. Most people day to day that I spend my time with disregard religion, it's something that's not spoken of, just derided above all. It's probably indecent of me to even mention this, but my belief or search for God is a long story, not particularly exciting or unique. As with most people, when all hope is lost, I turned to religion to try and fill a hole in my life that had been there since being educated in a Roman Catholic environment, I was indoctrinated from a young age. I know my New Testament, I know the hymns and believe me when I say this, there is a feeling unparalleled when singing along to words written by long dead believers citing historical fables as the key to salvation, it has a kind of fervour to it but it feels like it's mining a seam of something deeper, some feeling that is often forgotten, spirituality.

Oh, I sound all hokey, next I'll believe in homoeopathy and witchcraft. Nope, I'm a rational human being I like to think, I don't disregard science, I accept it and the necessities of evil in this world along with all that happens by chance, particles randomly ramming into each other etc. In my mind the Bible can be summed up in a simple statement, in fact all of the core religions in this world, the big six, have one unifying rule I believe we should all follow, the golden rule: 'Do unto others as you have them do unto you.' If people just did that and ignored the rest, well I reckon the world would be much easier, and that's a rule religion has long since the dawn of time championed, among other more specific stuff at the time they were written... But many scholars over the years have spent years reading and writing and thinking and writing and reading and meditating on biblical texts and have written reams on the core meaning of it all, and that's what a lot of them decided upon. Here's where I stand on my soap box and declare something even more inappropriate, I think there is a God, at least in some way. I stand by the belief that may seem quite atheistic but it nonetheless accurate, 'God made man and man made God.' That was a necessity in the past, people were plugging gaps in their knowledge, creating myths to follow to give reason to a world of chaos, making rituals to follow to maintain order. I think deep down, all humans, whether it's biological or evolution, have something inside them, something that's not necessarily seen with the eye, as much as they have the ability to acknowledge their existence, their propensity to live and die, they also have the ability to question the existence of a soul, deep deep down there is something inside them that makes them believe in the possibility of the divine. Is this even making sense? I'm not saying everyone is born deep down with a religious fervour, although it could be that, it could be the willingness to believe in the unknown, to feel something more is out there. I'll grant a lot of us have the knowledge that we are mounds of dust on a rock hanging in endless ether, not that most people let that bother them, some might not have a deep down spiritual sensation, perhaps that too is becoming extinct, perhaps it'll be bred out of us as less and less of us believe, or maybe young children are forced to believe from a young age and know no better (I'm aware that's the most likely option)... But I think that ability to believe in God, in the unknown, the breast beating sensation I experience when singing hymns and look at high vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows, I think that in itself is God. Sure that doesn't sound very convincing, a quirk of the brain, an unsubstantiated belief in the divine, or something implanted into our subconscious from a young age, that's God? That's just stupid. Well you never asked for my opinion, and I never asked for you to read it, it just is what it is; another one of those things in this world that exists, my belief in something somewhere in this world that is more than a sum of it's parts. It means something to me. I spent years looking for an answer trying to puzzle out that sensation of God and maybe that's my wound to cauterise but it's something I will most likely never stop searching for or at least believing in on some level, a mostly hidden unspoken of belief.

Which brings me to Philomena's somewhat guileless handling of the nunnery Philomena's son was taken from. I don't know the whole story so I don't pretend to know what it was that happened but the way the story pretty much flat out depicted the nuns as straight up 'evil' just seemed really unnecessary. I understand the film is poking fun at the fact that a story, a good one that grabs people's interest at least, has good and evil. The film needs a villain and it finds that in the Catholic church, big surprise; it was horrific what they did but sometimes in life, things just happen, life just trundles along and there are no reasons or explanations, life is just cruel like that. It works thematically for the film to have Philomena and Sixsmith to have their big emotional moment with something to put them at odds and present a comparison of their characters, it couldn't just be life being it usual intransigent self... I just didn't like the way they handled the nuns.

So after my big rambling intercourse on my own feelings behind God and the divine, what have I taken from this movie apart from my soap box? Uhmmm. I really liked how truly unparalleled Judi Dench is an actress and how Steve Coogan continues to impress me in his less comedic roles. Also the writing was good and it worked it just didn't need evil nuns, it could have done anything but had evil nuns; it's too easy to have evil religious types in this day and age, think outside the box chaps. It essentially ruined what could have been a heart warming interesting 'human interest' tale.