The Miracle Club: Faith isn't quite enough

The Miracle Club (2023) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and too harshly, for thematic elements and mild profanity

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

Although director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s gentle little dramedy has its moments, the best efforts of a powerhouse cast can’t quite overcome the issues left unresolved in the original story by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne.

 

Lily (Maggie Smith, right), Eileen (Kathy Bates, center) and Dolly (Agnes O'Casey) —
with her young son, Daniel (Eric D. Smith) — are delighted to learn that they've won
a trip to Lourdes, in France.

The year is 1967, the setting the (fictitious) hardscrabble Dublin suburb of Ballygar. One gets a sense — enhanced by the authentic locale and John Hand’s superb production design — that life hasn’t changed much during the past century. Pleasures are simple: boisterous family gatherings, a talent show at the local church.

Work is hard, money is scarce, family responsibilities — even under the most loving circumstances — leave no time for anything else. 

 

Travel? A vacation? Idle fantasy.

 

Of late, though, the daily struggle has been augmented by fresh worries for a couple of close friends. Eileen (Kathy Bates) is terrified that a lump on her breast might be cancer. Lily (Maggie Smith) is succumbing to the crushing guilt that has plagued her for years (the details of which emerge slowly). Both mourn the recent death of another friend, Maureen.

 

Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), a generation younger — and the sole Ballygar resident determined to bring a bit of London mod to the community — despairs over her silent young son, Daniel (Eric D. Smith, wide-eyed and adorable). She fears that the boy’s muteness, or unwillingness to talk, is somehow her fault. 

 

All three women — Eileen, Lily and Dolly — dream of making a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where millions travel each year, to bathe in the sacred waters and receive God’s grace. And, perhaps, a miracle.

 

Thanks to some clever maneuvering by the kindly parish priest, Father Byrne (Mark O’Halloran, note-perfect), a small miracle does occur … and, suddenly, all three get their wish: an all-expenses-paid trip to Lourdes. 

 

This includes something else they never expected: a brief bit of freedom. And independence.

 

Alas, the jubilant mood is dampened — for Eileen and Lily — by the unexpected appearance of Maureen’s daughter, Chrissie (Laura Linney), who fled to America 40 years ago, beset by scandal (the usual kind, given the time period). Dolly is too young to have any emotional response to Chrissie’s arrival, but it opens old wounds and long-unspoken betrayals involving Eileen and Lily.

 

Worse yet, Chrissie insists on joining the trip to Lourdes.

Sully: Flies high

Sully (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, and much too harshly for dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.9.16

Coulda-woulda-shoulda.

We are a species of second-guessers.

With precious seconds ticking away, after losing both engines to a bird strike, Capt. Chesley
"Sully" Sullenberger (Tom Hanks, right) and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) contemplate
several equally unpleasant options, every one of which carries the risk of killing
hundreds of people.

Even when something has been done properly, with the desired outcome, we often wonder: Might things have concluded even better, with a different set of actions?

Far worse, of course, is when an optimal result is challenged by others who question our judgment. Armchair quarterbacks who insist that, really, it should have gone down this way.

Human nature. Quite infuriating.

At first blush, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger would seem to be the last man on Earth to be confronted in such a manner; he is, after all, the hero who glided the disabled US Airways Flight 1549 Airbus A320 into a flat-out miraculous pancake landing on the Hudson River, on Jan. 15, 2009, saving the lives of all 155 passengers and crew. As any pilot can verify, water landings aren’t nearly as “soft” as a dive into a swimming pool; depending on speed and angle of impact, it’s more like slamming into a brick wall.

Who, then, could argue with Sully’s actions, given the results?

Ah, but that’s the hook behind director Clint Eastwood’s new film, which gains its dramatic tension from a crackerjack script by Todd Komarnicki, based on Sullenberger’s best-selling book, Highest Duty. Komarnicki and Eastwood manage a seemingly impossible feat, by injecting suspense into a narrative whose outcome we already know.

But that’s the point: Most folks don’t know the full story. Granted, everybody watched the amazing events on that January afternoon in 2009, many of us glued to TV sets. But while it’s true Sully saved all 155 people, he wasn’t able to save the plane itself ... and — sad to say — neither Airbus nor its insurance underwriters were going to take the loss of a $70 million aircraft lightly.

Ergo, the second-guessing, and this film’s suspense, as Sully — played with gravitas by Tom Hanks — and co-pilot Jeff Skiles (Aaron Eckhart) are grilled, after the fact, by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators who insist, armed with computer simulation test data, that the plane could have returned safely to the nearest La Guardia runway, or one at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport.

And we can’t help wondering: Could it be true?

At which point, Komarnicki and Eastwood have us hooked.

Mr. Holmes: Far from elementary

Mr. Holmes (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG, for disturbing images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

Some stage actors spend their entire careers hoping to play Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. When it comes to great literary characters, however, the ne plus ultra appears to be Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen, left) is delighted when his housekeeper's young son,
Roger (Milo Parker), expresses interest in the great detective's beloved hives of honeybees.
The boy, in turn, senses that sharing this hobby will help his much older friend forget, if
only for brief times, the unpleasant frustrations of advancing age.

How else to explain the scores of individuals who’ve taken a crack at the world’s most famous consulting detective? When Guinness World Records honored Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV, three years ago, he had been depicted 254 times by more than 75 actors.

That list now includes the venerable Ian McKellen, starring in director Bill Condon’s adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s 2005 Holmes pastiche, A Slight Trick of the Mind.

Arthur Conan Doyle purists may be dismayed by this handling of their beloved detective, for this is not the hard-charging rationalist depicted with authoritative panache by Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch and many others. McKellen instead gives us a frail, almost feeble Holmes, long removed from his illustrious career, vulnerable to the ravages of time, advanced age and self-doubt.

Condon’s film has an atmosphere of despondent finality about it: a tone similar to that employed by Richard Lester in 1976’s equally melancholy Robin and Marian, wherein Sean Connery’s exhausted and aging Robin Hood is poised at the similar precipice of mortality.

But even if this Holmes is a shadow of his former vigorous self, McKellen’s twinkling eyes and insightful gaze (at the detective’s better moments) remind us that the zealous pursuer of clues may be deeply buried within this dilapidated frame ... but he’s still there.

The time is 1947, and the 93-year-old Holmes is long retired, having moved to a quiet farmland home along the Sussex coast, in order to tend to his bees (as per Doyle’s projection of where the detective would wind up, late in life). Meals and other modest needs are handled by a live-in housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), and her young son, Roger (Milo Parker).

Her husband, the boy’s father, was killed in the war.

Scripter Jeffrey Hatcher retains the structure of Cullin’s book, which cross-cuts between three narratives. The first and most extensive, set in the “present” of 1947, finds the increasingly lonely Holmes bonding with young Roger, who in turn admires the great detective as a father figure. Roger’s mother, all too aware of Holmes’ age, worries that this might not be advisable for a boy who already has lost his real father.