Theater Whore: Philomena

Philomena 7/10

Philomena is a good movie. Thanks for reading! I'm kidding. Shut up. I didn't have a strong desire to see this because I couldn't quite figure out what it was about and was too lazy to read a synopsis. From the poster it appeared to be a strange buddy comedy about a guy and an older lady. It wasn't. While there are some funny parts you won't be slapping yourself on the knee cracking up. This is based off of a true story and stars Judi Dench as Philomena and Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith.

Philomena is shown as a young woman living in Ireland who after getting her groove on with a guy she met gets pregnant. The nuns who she is staying with don't take too kindly to this. She gives birth to a baby boy who she and the other girls who have had kids get to see once a week for an hour in between doing hard labor at the convent to repay the nuns for their generosity. As an older lady looking back at her past she tells her daughter about her son that was taken away and sold to a wealthy American couple. Her daughter in turn tells disgraced journalist Martin about this tale.

Martin and Philomena go to the old convent where they are told that the records that would help find her son were burned in a fire and that one of the worst nuns there is still alive but very old and ill. Martin attempts to write a human interest story about Philomena and they head to the U.S to further investigate what has become of her son. She worries that he is homeless or lost his legs in war or something horrible.

Martin has no religious convictions and challenges Philomena on hers. He can not understand how she has a belief in a God that had her live such a hard life and let her child be taken away. While in America they stay in Washington, D.C and do find out what happened to her son. They also find out about the kind of life he led, the people he grew up with, and even who he fell in love with. Philomena gets a sense of closure and Martin becomes more of a normal person because at times he behaves like a dick. On the other hand Philomena gets aggravating because she does that old people thing of being 100% sure about something and then ten minutes later become 100% sure of the opposite thing she was just sure of.

This was a good movie and was not what it looked like from the little I knew and assumed based off of the poster. While it was good I do not think it deserves the amount of awards and categories it is in. Was Dench good? Yeah. Best Actress good? No. Best Picture? Perhaps it should be here since it was such a rough year. It sucks that Coogan is not nominated for Best Actor or even Supporting Actor but Bruce Dern got it for Nebraska. I will never understand how these things work.

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