Philomena opens with a poop joke, but it’s an erudite poop joke. Steve Coogan is hearing medical results from his doctor, and he’s told his stool sample is “outstanding,” which Coogan’s character takes as a compliment, until the doc clarifies that Coogan hasn’t provided the sample yet.
So you see, it’s not scatological humor so much as phonic humor, playing off an amusing double entendre. It’s a moment that could have come from any Steve Coogan comedy, and during its opening salvo, Philomena feels like a traditional Coogan comedy. He plays Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC reporter and lately scandalized spin doctor in the British government.
He still attends industry functions, even though his name is splashed all over the evening news next to words like “disgraced” and “wrongdoing.” Like some intellectual blowhard in a Woody Allen movie, he tells everybody he wants to focus his newfound “freedom” on a book about Russian history, a line met with a collective yawn and eye roll.
It isn’t until he meets Judi Dench’s Philomena that his life starts to change, and so does the movie’s formula. A God-fearing Catholic woman of meager means, Philomena spends much of her days stuck in the past, specifically her time a half-century ago in an Irish convent.
A single sexual indiscretion at a state fair — a distorted memory, conjured through the reflections of a funhouse mirror — led to a baby boy, which was kept at the convent’s orphanage until, like all children birthed from “sin,” he was adopted, against his mother’s wishes, by a wealthy American couple, spirited away and never to be seen again.
She’s tried to track down her son over the years but was met with roadblocks by her fellow nuns. On the occasion of what would be her son’s 50th birthday, she’s finally ready to find him — and Martin Sixsmith, now in a position to accept an assignment as “low” as a human-interest story, is just the man to tell her story to the public.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s based on a true story, published by Sixsmith in 2009 as The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, and the movie unfurls like a great literary mystery crossed with an odd couple-comedy, with the filterless, starstruck and staunchly religious Philomena touring the U.S. capitol with the world-weary, cynical and atheistic Martin. The more information they uncover, the more tangled the story becomes, addressing subjects like faith, economics, politics, sexual orientation and church scandals in a tapestry of themes that transcend a simple human-interest story.
It sounds almost redundant to say once again that Dench’s performance is a master class in being vs. acting, that it’s an Oscar-worthy marvel of nuance. We expect this from Dench. Coogan less so, but in some ways, this movie can do for his reputation what The Way, Way Back did for Steve Carell’s: that is to say, unlock his potential for dramatic acting.
Coogan also impresses behind the camera. He and Jeff Pope wrote the screenplay together, and it’s the sort of elegant, perfectly constructed blueprint that ought to show up in screenwriting classes. And for the director, Stephen Frears, Philomena is a forceful comeback after the parade of back-bench features he’s helmed since 2006’s The Queen. While it’s a politer movie than his renegade work of the 1980s, the outrage that sparked classics like My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears is passionately present.
All roads in Philomena eventually lead to the clashing of the protagonists’ fundamental worldviews: a seemingly justified, if self-serving, righteousness, versus a state of enviable enlightenment that sees beyond earthbound foibles. Most of us will probably fall somewhere in between. But Philomena never feels like a spiritual or sociological lecture; it’s too wrapped up in its gritty detective story, and that remains its spellbinding hook.
On their journey, Philomena has a habit of explaining to Martin the dime-store romances she absorbs with the amazement of a reader who’s never encountered a cliché in her life: “I didn’t see that coming!” is her common refrain. It also, genuinely, captures this appeal of this wondrous movie.
PHILOMENA. Director: Stephen Frears; Cast: Judi Dench, Steve Coogan, Barbara Jefford, Mare Winningham, Sean Mahon, Peter Hermann; Distributor: Weinstein Company; Rating: PG-13; Opens: Wednesday at most area theaters