Philomena: a rare portrayal of the Catholic Church's failings
Stephen Frears's film about an Irish woman, played by Judi Dench, who is trying to trace the child that was taken from her reveals the sins and the secret strength of the religion
Posted by David Cox
Monday 4 November 2013 06.37 EST
theguardian.com
As the world's biggest, oldest, most influential and perhaps most colourful institution of any kind, the Catholic church has surely merited more attention than cinema has accorded it. Angels & Demons and Habemus Papam gave a hint of the possibilities, and that somewhat minor branch of pastoral activity, exorcism, has been more than adequately explored. Otherwise, we've had saintly but boring priests such as those of The Bells of St Mary's and Angels with Dirty Faces or absurdly delightful nuns like those in The Sound of Music and The Nun's Story.
In part, the prevalence of such sympathetic portrayals has reflected the lobbying power of the Legion of Decency, an extraordinarily effective body set up in the 1930s by Catholic bishops to bring Hollywood to heel. You might have thought that attitudes would have been turned upside down by the paedophile priests scandal, but things have changed less than you'd expect.
Last year, a documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, provided a cogent account both of the abuse inflicted and of the coverup that followed. Priests and nuns have been presented more acerbically than before in films such as Doubt; all the same, a definitive big-screen takedown has so far failed to appear. Yet surely nothing could have damned the church more decisively than the sexual exploitation of children entrusted to it by their parents.
Well, maybe there's one thing that could. How about stealing babies from vulnerable teenagers, selling them overseas and then preventing them tracing their parents by burning records of the transactions? This is the behaviour, as practised in real life by Irish nuns assigned to the care of fallen women, that's addressed by Stephen Frears in Philomena. Such a film, we might reasonably imagine, ought to do for the Vatican what Ewan McGregor's Camerlengo Patrick McKenna so nearly achieved with his antimatter bomb in Angels & Demons.
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/nov/04/philomena-catholic-church-failings-film-judi-dench