The Miracle Club

The Miracle Club (Thaddeus O'Sullivan, 2023) is an uninteresting picture about three Irish women who make a pilgrimage from Dublin to Lourdes in 1967.  The movie involves long-simmering conflicts among the pilgrims which are highlighted and brought to the fore by the trip. This is a prestige picture in terms of casting -- Maggie Smith plays the eldest pilgrim, Lily Fox, a frail old woman mourning the death of her charismatic son who drowned at age 19 forty years earlier.  She is accompanied to Lourdes by Eileen (played unconvincingly by Kathy Bates), a long-suffering housewife with six children and a useless husband acted by Stephen Rea.  (Bates is afflicted with a terrible stage-Irish accent and her gift for comedy is wasted in her dour role -- she has an outburst of vitriolic bitterness in the middle part of the movie that dampens proceedings and falsifies our view of her character.)  Laura Linney is good as Chrissie Ahearn, one of the "wild geese," returning to Ireland after forty years from Boston -- she has come back to Dublin to attend the funeral of her mother from whom she was estranged and is persuaded to go on the pilgrimage to France.  Dolly, a young mother with a mute son (he seems to be about four or five) travels to Dublin in the hope that a miracle will occur so that her son can speak (the little boy is also in tow).  There's a handsome kindly priest and a few other pilgrims that we never meet.  The Dublin characters are all poor -- it's not clearly established how they can afford to travel abroad (it has something to do with a talent show won by Lily, Eileen, and Dolly that yields two vouchers for the pilgrimage.  Chrissie's mother also paid to go on the pilgrimage and this accounts for a third travel voucher -- but there are five pilgrims featured in the movie and I'm not quite sure how the others managed to assemble the funds for the trip).  

All of the women are harboring dark secrets, suppressed for most of their lives.  Of course, these secrets which involve abortions, and attempted abortions, as well as disastrous love affairs, are all well-ventilated in melodramatic scenes played out on the tour bus, at the hotel in Lourdes, and in the bath house where the women squat or repose in sepulchral sarcophagus-shaped tubs of holy water.  The movie wasn't shot in Lourdes and so, apparently, the scenes in France are contrived by CGI.  There's nothing particularly surprising or moving about the women's travels which end in reconciliations, redemption, and mutual forgiveness.  The movie is earnest and self-serious -- it has almost no comedy.  The husbands of the pilgrims are portrayed as wholly useless obstructions to the plot.  There's a good scene in which Kathy Bates' feisty Eileen (who has a tumor in her breast) learns about the number of miracles documented to have occurred at Lourdes -- she announces to her fellow pilgrims that 62 miracles are said to have happened at Lourdes.  Lily Fox asks:  "Is that in one day?" to which Eileen bitterly replies "No, its 62 in all the years since 1857."  

The movie's politics as to abortion is curiously confused.  At least two of the women have attempted to "intentionally miscarry" their children.  The film (and the women) seem to regard this with horror, although it is, apparently, also thought to be a necessary horror.  The Miracle Club is professionally made, but it's high-powered cast is wasted in these dull proceedings.