Frears: Philomena (2013)

Philomena is based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, BBC Correspondant Martin Sixsmith’s 2009 account of his attempt to help fifty-year old Philomena Lee find the son that she was forced to give up for adoption while living in a Magdalene convent in the 1950s. Whereas the book oscillates between procedural and biography, devoting a fair amount of space to Philomena’s son, Anthony, the film is played more as straight procedural, as Philomena and Martin embark upon a search that takes them from Ireland to Washington D.C. On the one hand, that means that the film’s more dependent upon the rapport between Philomena, played by Judi Dench, and Martin, played by Steve Coogan - a rapport that, in its way, is as distinctive as that between Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip, which the film often echoes. In one of his best dramatic roles, Coogan’s just irreverent, sceptical and pragmatic enough to offset any sententious sentimentality – it’s no surprise that he co-wrote the screenplay, since his sardonic, downbeat wit is everywhere – while Dench plays Philomena close to her chest, nowhere near as oblivious as she seems yet somehow oblivious to the advantage that gives her in parrying Martin’s bluff repartee. It’s a rapport that both generates and punctures sentimentality, appropriate for a film that’s less a human interest story than about crafting a human interest story, punctuated by conversations between Martin and his editor. However, if the recourse to procedural works well for Philomena and Martin’s rapport, then it works even better for the nature of their discoveries – it’s no secret to anyone who’s read the book, or even read about it, that Philomena’s son, Anthony, or Michael Hess under his adoptive name, was a major legal adviser to the Reagan and Bush governments, a closeted homosexual, and a victim of AIDS. Searching for him, then, becomes a journey into the deepest recesses of the GOP closet – the final link in the chain is Michael’s boyfriend, who survived him – and there’s something about that closet, and that era, that lends itself to the askance treatment of procedural; it can only be glimpsed by looking awry, while ostensibly focusing on something else. In other words, and unlike the book, Frears decentres the closet to gesture towards its pervasiveness in touching and shaming the lives of every single character in the film, in a quite extraordinary, nested period piece, an elegy that exceeds its object.