Review: The Miracle Club

By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

A group of women from Ireland take a pilgrimage to Lourdes in The Miracle Club, an Irish film that takes a talented cast fronted by two Oscar winners (Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith) and two Oscar nominees (Laura Linney and Stephen Rea), but struggles to live up to their full potential.

Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, the largely well-meaning film is elevated by the inherent strengths of its marquee cast. But it ends up feeling somewhat awkwardly pitched between syrupy, faith-based TV movie about forgiveness and more cloying melodrama, as it powers through a number of predictable resolutions.

The year is 1967, and Eileen Dunne (Bates) and Lily Fox (Smith) are Dublin housewives seeking redemption and healing from the shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes in France. Chrissie (Linney) is the estranged adult daughter of their recently deceased friend, who has just returned to Ireland for her mother’s funeral after leaving for America four decades earlier, with old tensions existing between the women.

Through the church, and the help of the kind Father Dermot Byrne (Mark O’Halloran), the three women end up taking the trip to Lourdes, which provides the backdrop for a good chunk of the film’s dramatic revelations. They are joined by Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), a young mother from their block who is hoping for a miracle that will help her son start to talk.

The domestic scenes fall somewhat flat, with the husbands (including Rea as Eileen’s partner), who balk at their wives going on the trip, being left at home to take care of the cooking and kids, leading to some strained comedic beats about the men of their generation struggling with housework and childcare. The scenes in Lourdes, which were also shot in Ireland, have somewhat of a distracting, fake-looking feel to them. The film also tries to go to some darker, more dramatic places in its last act, but feels reluctant to fully step away from its more sunny, feel-good demeanour.

The film tries to have its cake and eat it too, never quite deciding if it wants to be a trite, faith-based movie about the power of belief or something more pointed about the culture in Ireland in the 1960s, and what it was like for women at the time. But the three leads do elevate the material, and they keep the film watchable, including a few more textured moments between Linney and Smith. Because of them, The Miracle Club is not entirely ineffective, even if we often sense that there is a better version of this movie starring these wonderful actresses.