Miracle Club Review
The Miracle Club (2023) Movie reviewOR movie run by Thaddeus O’Sullivanwritten by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager AND Jimmy Smallhorne and playing Laura Linney, Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Agnes O’Casey, Mark O’Halloran, Stephen Rea, Mark McKenna, Hazel Doupe, Niall Buggy, Lesley Conroy, Janet Grene, Shauna Higgins, Martin McDonagh AND Fionnuala Murphy.
Laura Linney stars in director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s heartfelt and poignant little drama, Club of Miracles. Set in the late 1960s, a woman named Chrissie (Linney) returns to a small Dublin village called Ballygar after the death of her mother. There is a story that Chrissie carries with her and, over the course of this film, she finds a new purpose and comes to terms with her challenging past. Club of Miracles it’s the kind of film that independent film audiences will appreciate, and it has other high-profile cast members that include the always terrific Kathy Bates and the incomparable Maggie Smith.
Bates and Smith portray Eileen Dunn and Lily Fox, a pair of elderly women looking for some kind of peace in their current lives. Eileen is married to a man (Stephen Rea) who only sometimes seems to understand her and the sacrifices she has made to raise a family. Lily’s past includes a previous relationship with Chrissie that is very complex in nature. Also joining the undefeated cast is Agnes O’Casey as Dolly, a woman with several children and a husband who doesn’t seem to understand her desires in life. Dolly wants to hear her son say something. Dolly’s son has not spoken and this worries Dolly greatly.
When our four central women finally pile all together on a bus bound for the town of Lourdes, they expect to find some kind of miracle that will help them make sense of their complicated lives. Eileen has found a lump that may be suspicious, while Lily never seems to understand why she had to lose her son Declan at such an early age. Chrissie is the one who at first doesn’t seem to fit in with the other women for very specific reasons.
An intriguing scene within the film is also a bit of humor in nature. It involves the discovery of healing water which is supposed to lead to miracles. When Eileen takes the plunge, she’s in for big things as Dolly tries to bring her son into the water too. Our ladies find that water has only performed less than a hundred miracles in the last 100 years, so they shouldn’t depend too much on finding instant gratification in their lives.
It’s the quieter moments in the film that stand out, like when Chrissie and a few other characters do the old dance called the “Hokey Pokey” in the background. Also particularly strong are the awkward moments where Chrissie feels that maybe she shouldn’t have come back for her mother’s funeral. Her mother has left her a note, and it seems it’s too little, too late for Chrissie to be back in town. However, there are many connections Chrissie has to make with Eileen and, especially, Lily, which can teach her a thing or two about self-forgiveness and appreciating being around others.
The real surprise of this film is not how great Linney, Smith and Bates are, but how wonderful Agnes O’Casey is as Dolly, the mother who challenges her husband to do what is right for her son . This is a star role for O’Casey against some heavy hitters that O’Casey more than keeps close. Dolly is a well-written and earnest character who longs to find fulfillment and cannot accept the mundane life that seems to have been given to her. She wants more, especially for her children and learns a little about herself and her friends along the way.
Bates is predictably in the lead in one of her most nuanced recent performances. Smith and Linney share some wonderful scenes together where they ache and hurt emotionally over events that happened in the past. While this pain is great, the healing power of friendship takes center stage as the film progresses towards its conclusion, where all these women have learned a little more about themselves and characters like Eileen’s husband and Dolly’s husband discover that there is much more to appreciate. those. women than they had originally understood.
For whatever reason, Linney is the glue that holds this movie together. Chrissie is fully fleshed out as a flawed character, but there is humanity in her soul that makes her a person of character who needs to find her reason to live again. She had given up on life a while ago and, after all, she finds a kind of happy medium in her life. Another standout performance is that of Mark O’Halloran as Father Dermot Byrne, while Rea has some standout moments when his character cooks a dinner for his family, which they laughably don’t seem too interested in. I happily eat it because it is not very tasty.
Club of Miracles it’s no small feat for the talent involved in terms of pacing, plot structure, and character development. It is a bigger success based on the quality of the acting. It’s always great to see Linney working again and Agnes O’Casey is an actress to put on your radar. She deserves a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in this film, and we can only hope that enough people see it to put her in the running.
ASSESSMENT: 7.5/10
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