The Magdalene Sisters Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)May 29th, 2003
THE MAGDALENE SISTERS
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: B+
Miramax Films
Directed by: Peter Mullan
Written by: Peter Mullan
Cast: Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Eileen Walsh, Mary Murray, Britta Smith Screened at: MGM, NYC, 5/28/03
For quite a while, the Catholic Church appears to have covered up many situations involving the molestation of minors by a handful of priests. When the word got out to the general public, the Church no longer denied the occurrences. The excuse was, "There are always some rotten apples at the bottom of the barrel." Fair enough. But how to explain the existence of the Magdalene asylums in Ireland, run by the ironically named Sisters of Mercy, which housed up to 30,000 women as virtual slaves in the laundries of the institutions and made quite a few bucks (or punts, if you will) from the labor of these unfortunate prisoners? According to the production notes for Miramax Films' "The Magdalene Sisters," the film is a composite sketch highlighting four of these 30,000 women who not only were given indeterminate sentences by the Church (which seem to have been handed down without the intervention of the government) for offenses which rational people in today's world would hardly consider crimes. Though the Scottish writer-director Peter Mullan, whom fans of indie cinema will immediately recognize as the man who played the title character in Ken Loach's "My Name is Joe," employs melodramatic flourishes common to prison pics, our knowledge that the conditions under which these women were housed were even worse than depicted here.
Carefully and patiently building up his explorations of character, Mullan at first introduces the four girls who stand in presumably for thousands of others. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), for example, is hauled away to the Magdalene institution by her father for the "crime" of being raped by her cousin in a back room during a wedding ceremony. (Blaming the victim makes one think of the attitude of many Japanese from the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who ostracized fellow citizens disfigured by the blast and the radiation.) Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is an orphan who, approaching adulthood, is sent by the orphanage to the Magdalene folks for the "crime" of attracting the attention of flirtatious lads. Rose (Dorothy Duff), who has just given birth out of wedlock to an infant whom her mother refuses to look at, is pressured by the local priest to sign away the baby for adoption and is then hustled off to the Magdalenes. Crispina (Eileen Walsh), who appears mentally slow and who has been a guest of the institution for a while, grows steadily insane under the eyes of the nuns.
Though Peter Mullan illustrates the redundant tasks of the women who wash clothes for private clients who pay the sisters for the uncompensated labor of the inmates, he takes care to avoid lumping the young women together. You'll have no doubt as you leave the theater as to which girl is the spunkiest, which the simplest, which the most passive, while the standout performance is Geraldine McEwan's as Sister Bridget. Bridget, who is Mullan's Nurse Ratched in this Irish version of a cuckoo's nest, speaks well, her sense of humor coming across in a talk she gives to the girls, the other nuns, and to the visiting archbishop during a filming of Leo McCarey's 1945 film "The Bells of St. Mary's." You get the impression that you could get along with her if you never talked back, never tried to escape, and did your job dutifully every day. Get on her bad side, though, and you can be given three or four lashes on the backside or even get beaten up unmercifully all punishments apparently ignored or condoned by outside political and ecclesiastical authorities. In the film's most shocking scene, the girls are lined up completely nude while two nuns loudly joke with each other like pair of sorority sisters hazing pledges, conducting a contest for who has the largest breasts and the most pubic hairs.
What makes this whole gruesome business especially shocking is that none of the people in authority have the slightest feeling of guilt, remorse or even knowledge that what they are doing is evil. Not the father who throws his teenaged daughter out for being raped, not the cousin who performed the rape, not the sisters for joking about their charges' anatomy, and apparently nobody in Ireland's political world. Think of Hannah Arendt's classic study, "The Banality of Evil," positing the view that the Nazis performing their horrendous experiments and mass executions actually believed they were doing the right thing, going home to their loving families as though their jobs were all in a day's work.
These medieval laundries remained open until the year 1996. The buzz is that Church officials are not too pleased about its impending release, but if they've learned from the past picketing against Martin Scorcese's 1988 picture "The Last Temptation of Christ" (which brought in a huge box office) they will avoid calling negative attention to Mullan's gutsy work.
Not Rated. 119 minutes. Copyright 2003 by Harvey Karten at [email protected]
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