Movie Review – Philomena

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Spoiler alerts – 2013 A true and deeply sad, sometimes angry movie about the terrible findings a woman discovered concerning her missing son. Philomena Lee got pregnant in the mid 1950’s when she was just fourteen. Her lover abandoned her and she was cast into a Magdalene convent laundry, where after her son was born, she was only allowed to see him for an hour a day. Then one day, aged only about four, he was simply gone as the nuns had him adopted without giving his Mum a chance to say goodbye. Fifty years on, Philomena (played by Judy Dench) was still desperately asking the nuns if they had records of her son’s adoption. She found them uncooperative but her search was assisted by an agnostic reporter, Martin Sixmith. The pair traced Philomena’s son, Michael’s adoption to Washington. He had been sold to a wealthy US family by the convent, a fate that befell thousands of adopted Irish children. Michael had done well in politics, becoming a close advisor to Ronald Reagan, but Michael had to conceal his homosexuality as it could have ruined his Republican career. He had died eventually of AIDS. That is not astonishingly the final heartbreak for his mother. Further questioning of his US family and friends revealed that Philomena’s son had spent his life looking for her, and had even visited the convent, only for the nuns there to spitefully avoid telling him that his loving longing mother lived only a few miles away. His ashes had been sent to the convent and buried in the grounds there. Sixmith confronted the nuns for their cruel hateful behaviour though Philomena was more forgiving. The movie, written and produced by Coogan, is based on Sixmith’s book, which was followed up by stories of hundreds of other women who had their children taken for money by convents all over Ireland too. The film is often funny and then sad but ultimately shocking and angry, all the more so for being factual. Arthur Chappell