MOVIE REVIEW

Magdalene Sisters, The  (2003)

Starring: Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy
Director: Peter Mullan

Rating: R

Studio: Miramax

Release Date: 8.08.03

Review Posted: 8.14.03

Spoilers: Minor

By Sara Michelle Fetters

"Magdalene Sisters" Blistering Reminder of Sins in the Name of God

Peter Mullan’s new film “The Magdalene Sisters” is a prison break film set in a convent. If that seems more than a little absurd, consider that the Magdalene Laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland had something in the range of 30,000 girls pass through their doors up until the last institution closed in 1996. These weren’t paid laborers but instead women forgotten and abandoned by society, put into the institutions for “crimes” as random as premarital sex, victims of rape or an amorously attractive physical appearance.

Inside, these stridently devout institutions were run more like forced labor camps rather than an instrument of divine intervention and retribution. Unless claimed by friends or family, or lucky enough to escape, many women spent there entire lives slaving away hand washing Irish laundry, ending their days in an unmarked grave.

A mixture of fact and fiction, Mullan’s movie takes the church and this viciously stringent form of Irish Catholicism to task for their decades of abuse. And even if the film tends to slide into didactic one-sidedness, “The Magdalene Sisters” is still an awesomely powerful document of degradation and abandonment, all done in the name of God.

Spanning the years 1964 to 1969, the movie chronicles the travails of three young teenage women sent to a local countryside Magdalene Laundry. For young Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), it is a rape at the hands of a drunken cousin during a family wedding that causes her institutionalization, the accusing eyes of all the men present at the ceremony drilling through the poor girl as if such a thing was her own fault and not that of her malignant relative.

For the delicately beautiful Rose (Dorothy Duffy), her misdeed is to be the poor mother of an unwed child. Her cries to keep the infant and raise it as her own unheard, the scruffy youngster is instead sent straight to the convent to spend the rest of her days washing clothes, renamed Patricia by the stern headmistress Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan).

Finally, there is the movie star beautiful Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone). Her crime? Only that she’s an orphan who gives the nuns the orphanage a headache because her beauty seems to catch the eye of every adolescent boy in Ireland. It’s just too much for the nuns to handle, a girl with such prettiness and no parents must surely be on her way to sin. So it is off to the Magdalene Laundry for her as well, a lifetime of servitude to God guaranteed to erode all that wanton sexiness of hers.

Here they also meet the simple, child-like and doe-eyed Crispina (Eileen Walsh). She’s not entirely gifted with all of her mental faculties, not quite understanding why it is she’s been brought to this place, but more than happy to work the rest of her days just as long as she has her trusty St. Christopher’s medal and gets the occasional glimpse of her young son standing behind the laundry’s gate. It is Crispina, however, who must endure the cruelest fate. With the loss of her prized medal and the abusive advances of a priest, her world comes unhinged resulting in a new form of imprisonment even more horrifying than the one she endures daily in the wash works.

If Mullan’s film borders on being a little too one-sided and didactic, it’s a fault that can be easily forgiven thanks to the dramatic intensity of the tale. While the Catholic Church has screamed and hollered about this movie, about the supposed inaccuracies and half truths being told by Mullan, it is still far too difficult to get passed the fact that these convents were nothing more than forced labor camps. Besides, it is a known verity that disobedience in the laundry was dealt with in the harshest of manors; beating and the bloody shearing of all a woman’s hair frequent ways to ensure obedience. And then there are those hundreds of secret, unmarked graves. How in the world can the church ever think to pass those off as nothing to be curious or upset about?

The movie is blisteringly well acted by the leads, especially Noone as the fiery Bernadette. Even when considering this extreme form of Irish Catholicism that led to the girl’s imprisonment, her only crime has been to be fine-looking. There’s been no sex, no unwanted children, just the allure of the possibility of carnal actions and for that she’s been sent to work her life away in an inhuman institution. She’ll do anything to escape, even use those feminine whiles on a dim-witted delivery boy for his aid, thus making her just the type of girl the nuns at her old orphanage feared she was going to be; their sending her to the laundry facilitating that very change.

But the real standout is veteran McEwan. Teary-eyed over Ingrid Bergman and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” one moment, in hysteric rants over the loss of the key to her precious safe the next, the veteran stage and screen actress galvanizes with her iron-clad presence. She’s the warden of our attentions, holding me prisoner just as much as she was the girls slaving away silently in the facility’s basements. A finely tuned performance, this just isn’t a one-sided portrayal of evil hiding behind a wall of good intentions. McEwan makes the sister much more sinister than that, choosing to portray her as a devout woman obsessed with doing the painful and belligerent duties she feels are the key to divine salvation.

Still, this is a dank and distressing film on many levels. Mullan has shot it with a painter’s eye, mixing light and dark so delicately that the emotional and physical devolution of the women becomes almost too much to bear. In fact, even though it’s no secret the film is moving towards the hoped-for final escape of our heroes, the director even then refuses to leave on a note of hopefulness, instead opting for a coda that only brings out even more vociferously exactly how much this institution has obliterated one woman’s soul.

It’s almost all-too painful to watch, even with a tinge of silver lining towards the very end. Yet, watch we must, if only to remember that sometimes the most egregious of sins are made under the pretense of saving souls. In a world being ripped apart by war and religious misunderstanding, it is the veracity of “The Magdalene Sisters” that holds forever true; a blistering reminder of where a world can go all in the name of God.

Rating: êêê1/2   (out of 4)

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