Posts tagged Mare Winningham

“A Heartbreaking Tragicomedy”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Philomena stars Judi Dench and Steve Coogan in a heartbreaking movie based on a true story and the 2009 memoir, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee.

Back in the early 1950s, Philomena was a teenage girl in Ireland who met a young man at a fair and became pregnant after experiencing the joys of sex for the first time.

Because of the shame she had brought to her family, Philomena was sent to a convent to deliver her baby, a boy that she named Anthony, and then she was forced to work in the convent along with other young women in similar circumstances, who were all allowed to visit with their children only one hour a day.

When he was three years old, Anthony was sold by the nuns to an American couple who adopted him and took him back to the United States without Philomena being notified or allowed to say goodbye to him.

On what would have been Anthony’s fiftieth birthday, Philomena decides to try to find out what happened to Anthony and perhaps learn if he ever thought of his birth mother.

She meets a journalist, Martin Sixsmith, and although he claims that he doesn’t write human-interest stories, Philomena’s story intrigues him enough that his editor is willing to pay his expenses in order to track down Anthony and write a story about Philomena and Anthony.

Martin learns that Anthony had worked in Washington, DC, and because he has some contacts there, Martin is going to travel there and hope to learn more, which prompts Philomena to say, “I think I would like to go.”

And now we have a road trip with the odd couple of a little old unsophisticated Irish lady and a jaded young journalist who has been around the world before.

In spite of the circumstances of the story and the background, this is a warm comedy that produces both chuckles and laughs as Philomena and Martin discover the American identity of Anthony and the surprising facts about his life in the United States.

On the other hand, this is the kind of story for which the word “tragicomedy” was invented, and expect it to win many more awards than it already has.

Philomena proves once again that Dench is a terrific actress, sometimes using only her face to move us.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”