On Thursday I had the strange honor of finding myself denounced, by name, in a full-page color ad placed on page C5 of the New York Times. A humble movie critic rarely finds himself the object of so much excited attention. What had I done to incur this thunderclap?
I had published this review of the movie Philomena, in the New York Post. In response, the subject of the film, Philomena Lee, wrote an open letter, first given to the Hollywood news site Deadline.com, and Harvey Weinstein’s The Weinstein Co. then excerpted the letter in ad taken out in the Times.
The movie is based on the true story of an Irish woman (played by Judi Dench) who works with a British journalist (Steve Coogan) to uncover the truth about a son she lost contact with after putting him up for adoption in 1952. I found it to be one of those tiresome Hollywood contrivances that marries thin jokes to a forced odd-couple road-trip story. The primary reason it was made, as far as I could tell, was that is afforded the opportunity to bash Catholicism by singling out the Irish convent that took in Philomena Lee, the Dench character, as a young woman and (according to the script) sold the kid to an American couple, put the young lady into forced labor, and then probably destroyed all records of the matter. The secondary reason the film was made was the opportunity to slip in some extra-gratuitous Republican bashing in the second half: It turns out that the child grew up to be a Republican official who, in the Reagan era, was a gay man who contracted AIDS and supposedly came to hate his party for its stance on the disease and on gays in general.
There are those who see this story differently, such as those who actually know something about what really happened. Sister Julie Rose, assistant congregation leader at the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Roscrea, County Tipperary, told The Tablet that the order never accepted payment in return for adoptions and didn’t destroy any records. She also said that a scene depicting Sister Hildegard McNulty harshly denouncing Lee for giving in to her “carnal” desires was simply fabricated, and that the filmmakers admitted this to her, claiming dramatic license.
Lee insists I misunderstood the film and that it isn’t anti-Catholic. She points out that the film includes a scene or two of her standing by her faith and forgiving those who have wronged her. True, and I have no doubt that it’s a heady experience to be portrayed by an Oscar winner on film. Lee is a full-on participant in the campaign to win Dench an Oscar nomination.
But what Lee doesn’t mention in her open letter is that, as portrayed by Dench, her character is a very nice, lovable dimwit. Dench’s Philomena babbles endlessly about a romance novel she’s reading and is excited by the prospect of watching Big Momma’s House on TV. The audience is meant to see her story through the eyes of the wised-up, cynical, metropolitan, atheist journalist played by Coogan, who essentially plays the straight man as Dench gets laughs by being a dunce. That Philomena Lee forgives the Church doesn’t make the audience feel any warmth to it; her expansive spirit simply makes her look like a saint as well as an idiot. Picture Lincoln ending with the dying president saying, “I forgive the man who shot me.” Would that make us walk out of the film thinking John Wilkes Booth was a fine human being? No, but it would make Lincoln even more impressive.
Critics who aren’t Catholic keep saying the film doesn’t amount to Catholic bashing. Well. A Tablet reader said, “People would have left the film with an abiding sense of an unreconstructed Catholic Church.” William Donohue of the Catholic League (a kind of Harvey Weinstein of religion) added that the film is “pure propaganda” and “bunk.” Even Variety noticed that the film is “a howl of anti-clerical outrage wrapped in a tea cozy.” “Philomena is meant to be a testament to good things, not an attack,” Lee says in her open letter to me. When I was a kid, I meant to be the second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, but that’s not how things worked out.
Harvey Weinstein, whose company is distributing this British film in the United States, is perhaps the canniest operative alive when it comes to drumming up Oscar attention for his movies, and he is making Lee a character in the awards campaign in order to pump up Dench’s chances for an Oscar nomination. His attack ad on me is meant to draw on a reliable source of Oscar voter enthusiasm — loathing of conservatives and everything we stand for, very much including Christianity in particular if not faith in general. I’ll have more to say about this in Sunday’s New York Post.