Taglines: The best journeys take you home.
The Miracle Club (2023) movie storyline. Ballygar, Ireland, 1967. The Miracle Club is a heartwarming film that follows the story of three generations of close friends, Lily (Maggie Smith), Eileen (Kathy Bates), and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) of Ballygar, a hard-knocks community in Dublin, who have one tantalizing dream: to win a pilgrimage to the sacred French town of Lourdes, that place of miracles that draws millions of visitors each year. When the chance to win presents itself, the women seize it.
However, just before their trip, their old friend Chrissie (Laura Linney) arrives in Ballygar for her mother’s funeral, dampening their good mood and well-laid plans. The women secure tickets and set out on the journey that they hope will change their lives, with Chrissie, a skeptical traveler, joining in place of her mother.
The glamor and sophistication of Chrissie, who has just returned from a nearly 40-year exile in the United States, are not her only distancing traits: Old wounds are reopened along the way, forcing the women to confront their pasts even as they travel in search of a miracle. Their shared traumas can only be healed by the curative power of love and friendship.
The Miracle Club is a 2023 drama film directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, and starring Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, Maggie Smith and Stephen Rea. The film’s plot involves a group of working-class women from Dublin on a pilgrimage to Lourdes in France.
It premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Festival on 9 June 2023,[6] before receiving a theatrical release in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics on July 14, 2023, and in the United Kingdom by Lionsgate UK on September 29, 2023.
Film Review for The Miracle Club
Sweet and well-intentioned but bland and disappointing, The Miracle Club is one of those slow, meandering Irish dramas that inspire more respect than excitement. Set in a seaside town near Dublin in 1967, it centers on a disparate group of women who travel to Lourdes to honor a friend and the various ways the spiritual influence of the trip changes them forever.
Chrissie Ahearn (played by a miscast but nevertheless distinguished Laura Linney, in another noble, polished performance) returns home for her mother’s funeral, chagrined to discover the chapel is empty. Everyone, it seems, is going to a talent show charity benefit in her mother’s honor. The first prize is two tickets to Lourdes chaperoned by the local priest.
Chrissie has been living in America for the past 40 years. Her mother’s old friends are not happy to see her. A good chunk of the movie that follows is devoted to the complex reasons why Chrissie left town in anger, resentment and disgrace. Seems she loved a boy named Declan Fox, who drowned at sea in 1927 at the age of 27, leaving her pregnant and desperate.
Declan’s mother Lily (the great Maggie Smith, struggling with a hugely unintelligible Irish accent for the first time in her illustrious career) has never forgiven Chrissie for aborting her child after Declan’s death, and Chrissie has never forgiven Lily’s best friend Eileen (Kathy Bates) for divulging her personal secrets to the entire town, making Chrissie the object of ridicule and more than a bit of local hostility, as well as a pariah to her own mother. A multitude of facts, whispers and lies are revealed in a long-winded screenplay that fails to adequately explore anything beyond surface character development.
On the pilgrimage to Lourdes, Chrissie’s late mother’s three best friends—Eileen, Lily, and a younger woman named Dolly—board the bus with hope and anticipation, but Chrissie, who looks on the entire adventure as a religious joke, goes along too, out of guilt for ignoring her mother’s love for 40 years. In the film’s only attempt at irony or humor, Lourdes is revealed as a rather embarrassing tourist attraction, replete with a “Hotel Bernadette” that features a gift shop for souvenirs of the Virgin Mary.
Chrissie is forced to share a room with the ladies who have made her homecoming wretched, which makes no sense, but affords them all a contrived chance to confront their true feelings. In the third act, the movie splinters into a series of tearful narratives in which they all pray for their pilgrimage to bring them miracles: Eileen has breast cancer, Lily and Chrissie suffer from traumatic memories that must be resolved, and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) has a young son named Danny who hasn’t spoken a word, for unexplained reasons known only to the director, Thaddeus O’Sullivan. The movie is about how Lourdes, despite numerous challenges and drawbacks, has a strange, restorative spiritual effect that reconciles them all in epiphanies of love and forgiveness that are not entirely plausible.
The badly needed charm missing in the script for this lackluster film falls to the ladies who inhabit it, and they work hard to make it work. Managing their diverse Irish accents is daunting, trying to understand them is even more of an uphill slog. The solemn direction and lack of tempo come uncomfortably close to a dirge. The Miracle Club is a sincere and meritorious effort, enhanced by John Conroy’s beatific cinematography that vividly captures the quiet stoicism of rural Ireland, but it leaves you empty, undernourished, and wanting more.
The Miracle Club (2023)
Directed by: Thaddeus O’Sullivan
Starring: Laura Linney, Kathy Bates, Maggie Smith, Stephen Rea, Agnes O’Casey, Mark McKenna, Niall Buggy, Hazel Doupe, Mark O’Halloran, Lesley Conroy, Brenda Fricker, Rose Henderson
Screenplay by: Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager, Joshua D. Maurer
Production Design by: John Hand
Cinematography by: John Conroy
Film Editing by: Alex Mackie
Costume Design by: Judith Williams
Art Direction by: Owen Power
Music by: Edmund Butt
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some language.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films (United Kingdom), Sony Pictures Entertainment (United States)
Release Date: June 9, 2023 (Tribeca), July 14, 2023 (United States), September 29, 2023 (United Kingdom)
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