The primary satisfaction in the cheeky and low-key but emotionally resonant period-piece drama “The Miracle Club” is in seeing world-class actresses including Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney playing characters who are more than mothers or wives, although that’s part of it too. With the “Book Club” movies and “80 for Brady” and the upcoming Diane Keaton-Alfre Woodard-Kathy Bates film “Summer Camp,” we’re seeing something of a subgenre of buddy movies in which the buddies just happen to be women who lived full and long lives — and who have personalities beyond the wisecracking granny or the saintly matriarch or the loyal and supportive wife of so many years.
Directed by the Irish filmmaker Thaddeus O’Sullivan, who’s a spry 76 himself, “The Miracle Club” is set in 1967 in Ballygar, a working-class village in Galway County, Ireland. They could have called this “One Funeral and Four Women,” as we begin with a memorial service (of a kind) and then follow four women on a journey both geographical and spiritual and, of course, life-changing.
