‘The Miracle Club’ highlights healing in many ways

Laura Linney and Mark O'Halloran star in a scene from the movie “The OSV News classification is A-III -- adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 -- parents are strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. (OSV News photo/Jonathan Hession, Sony Classics)

HOUSTON — The recent release of “The Miracle Club” movie brings a trifecta of award-winning actresses, which even has one of its stars fangirling over working with Grande Dame Maggie Smith and industry legend Kathy Bates.

Laura Linney, herself an Emmy Award-winning actor, said in interviews before the July 14 theater openings, “Honestly, I would’ve done anything to work with them. I was just lucky that it also involved a story that was charming and had a big heart.”

Set in 1967, each of the main characters has a reason to need a miracle in their Irish working-class neighborhood near Dublin. Smith plays Lily, whose son drowned decades before at the age of 19, which she sadly believes was her punishment from God.

Bates is Eileen, married to an unappreciative husband and is the mother of a large family, who has just found a lump in her breast. A generation younger, Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) is the mother of a young son who is five years old and still doesn’t speak.

Linney’s character, Chrissie, returns to Ireland for the first time in decades, looking sophisticated and polished after being “banished” 40 years before to the United States. She visits her mother’s closed casket alone at the local church after failing to see her before she passed, a beloved friend of the other women.

But all the parishioners are busy in the church hall participating in a talent contest, with the top prize being tickets to a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes, the famous Basilica of healing in France. The 21-hour bus trip, including a ferry ride, from Ireland to the sanctuary in the south of France is glossed over, showing their arrival at the Hotel de Bernadette.

Intermittent portrait-like visions of the main Basilica in Lourdes sitting atop a hill with the rushing river and grotto below show the sacred beauty of the place tucked below the Pyrenees Mountains. But there is also a nod recognizing the commercialization of the site, at times called “the Catholic Disney Land,” that draws more than three million pilgrims every year, more than travel to Mecca or Jerusalem.

The holy site began its renown in 1858 when a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, reported to Church officials that she spoke to a mysterious woman several times. The woman described herself as “the Immaculate Conception,” otherwise known as the Virgin Mary.

Since then, there have been 70 medical miracles recognized at Lourdes, including a recent healing of Sister Bernadette Moriau featured on the news program “60 Minutes” last year. She was freed from needing a wheelchair caused by a Cauda Equina diagnosis, a disorder of nerves and lower spine that eventually leads to total paralysis.

But as the news show pointed out, with just 70 medical miracles recognized in more than 160 years, “you’d have better odds playing the lotto.” Yet thousands of faithful line up at the baths and grotto where the first miracle is said to have occurred.

Smith and Linney have one of the film’s best scenes together when Lily visits the baths filled with holy water at the shrine. Chrissie dismisses what she calls “all the hocus pocus.” Lily gently responds, “There’s always hope, isn’t there, even when you don’t completely believe.” It’s a lovely, delicate scene despite the chaos of people desperately seeking cures.

The parish priest, Father Byrne (Mark O’Halloran), delivers the film’s message in responding to Bates’ character, who calls the site “a bloody gimmick.” The pastor says softly, “You don’t come to Lourdes for a miracle, Eileen; you come for the strength to go on when there is no miracle.”

The Miracle Club is rated PG-13 for some language and thematic elements.