THE MAGDALENE SISTERS (2002) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Peter Mullan
Geraldine McEwan, Nora-Jane Noone, Eileen Walsh,
Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy, Mary Murray
A grim and gripping account of life inside the walls of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, where for 100 years the ironically named Sisters of Mercy endeavored to save the souls of wayward girls by working them to death. Anybody familiar with the workings of old-style Catholicism and its dual capacity for cruelty and kindness will know what's going on here, though if you're expecting much in the way of kindness, you should probably look somewhere else. (If you went to a Catholic grade school in the days of the hooded nuns, Geraldine McEwan's Sister Bridget is your worst childhood nightmare come to scary cinematic life.) Mullan stacks the deck some, but he knows his subject and he makes a powerful point. The movie took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival at the same time the Church predictably was condemning it. Not that the Church had anybody else to blame. The brutality and abuse dramatized in the picture were real enough, and the last laundry didn't close till 1996.
Geraldine McEwan
(1932-2015)
