If you have felt visceral hatred for Love Actually for 20 years now, rejoice: there is a new snivelling, almost illogical Laura Linney performance to resent (Linney who, make no mistake, is one of our most empathetic working actors today when used properly). The Miracle Club calls itself “quietly feminist” but not even a stethoscope on the main speakers at Wembley Arena could pick up the supposed nuances of this wet, dreary portrait of lonely and longing women in 1960s Dublin, searching for anything to give their lives meaning, namely a pilgrimage to Lourdes to fix all their ailments.
A conversation surrounding the worthiness of this story – one on the invisible labour of women with families and hopes and dreams – is so obvious it’s pointless, but director Thaddeus O’Sullivan shoots The Miracle Club like a televised variety show: lifeless and borderline tacky lighting, unimaginative framing, clunky dialogue and as much emotional nuance as a teaspoon. Dame Maggie Smith suffers through every scene as Lily Fox, righteously grumpy but irritatingly bland; Kathy Bates evidently should have taken the rest of the year off after the warm charm of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret earlier this year, and poor rising star Agnes O’Casey is almost as lost as her character Dolly Hennessy, desperate for her young son to speak again. Perhaps the boy appreciates what is blindingly obvious to anyone watching: that if you have nothing nice to say, it’s better to say nothing at all.
The problem with The Miracle Club comes from the obvious fact that this isn’t a fairytale, and miracles won’t come from the places you hope or think they possibly could; but what that means is that the payoff is so lacklustre you wonder why the film was even made at all. Salvation doesn’t come from Lourdes and it barely comes from home either. It would be believable for it to come from the bond between these women if the chemistry felt like they hadn’t been forced to sit together on the bus on a busy morning commute.
Not emotional enough for melodrama, nor powerful enough for a crisis of faith, and definitely not convincing enough for any kind of genuine family drama, this is little more than a checklist of themes – Grief! Faith! Feminism! Family! – standing in for any true complexity (sadly not unusual for female-led films in particular). Deep love and pain runs through families like these in the real world: but this depiction holds less water than anything that ever ran even through Lourdes.
91mins, cert 12A
