The Miracle Club does not begin with an abundance of promise. Everything about this movie is based around and upon melodrama of the highest order, but it’s somehow never clearer than in the opening 15 or so minutes, in which the tone is almost funereal and the central quartet of characters appear to be readying for something truly dire. There does end up being a literal reason for the funereal treatment of these scenes, as those characters discover that someone very close to them has died, but at the moment of the film’s opening, some of them are not aware of that fact. It isn’t really a dire circumstance that has brought three of the four together. It’s only that those three are a triplet of singers getting ready for a performance in a talent competition.
The opening stretch does tell us a lot about what to expect from the movie, which is to say that a lot of it lacks much in the way of forward motion or obvious conflict. That’s good news for director Thaddeus O’Sullivan, whose only job is not to careen the movie off into territory that might be grossly manipulative. It’s not-so-good news for the characters in the movie, though, because it seems inevitable that conflict will impose itself upon them in due course. It does help that three screen actresses of the caliber of Laura Linney, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith are at the service of material that any or all of them could elevate in their sleep. It’s clear that O’Sullivan is banking on that potential.
Bates plays Eileen, whose marriage to a dull husband (Stephen Rea) is complicated by the sudden appearance of a lump on her breast. Smith plays Lily, an elderly woman who hasn’t got much time left on this mortal coil and jumps at the opportunity of a trip to Lourdes. That’s the prize for winning the talent competition, which they and their younger teammate Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) do, each for different reasons. The main one boils down to the promise of healing waters in Lourdes, where Eileen’s cancer and Dolly’s mute son (Eric D. Smith) might perhaps be cured. Obviously, some form of conflict needs to interact with these characters’ sole motivation. Otherwise, there’s not much story here with which to work for screenwriters Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager, and Jimmy Smallhorne.
That conflict arrives in the person of Chrissie (Linney), whose mother was Lily’s best friend and the organizer of the talent competition before her death. Eileen is Chrissie’s cousin, and the two shared a friendship with Lily’s son many years ago – long before the son died and left Lily an inconsolable shell of herself. Chrissie, though, left the small town in which they had all grown up for a reason that forms the central mystery of her return and of the gossip that spreads through town as a result of it. That also powers the film through the entirety of its plot, as these characters become more and more desperate not to confront that reason head-on.
It is a true tragedy that drove Chrissie’s abandonment of her former life, and there are even sadder truths that resulted from it in the interim. The performances here – especially a scene shared between Smith and Linney, as Lily feels the need to apologize to Chrissie for what turns out to be a very good reason – are quite strong, and the focus on the characters is appreciated. That is, until The Miracle Club becomes too much about the melodramatic conflict that threatens both these relationships and the lightness of the film’s whole constitution.
Photo courtesy of Sony Picture Classics
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