The Miracle Club

“The Miracle Club’s fumbling ‘Mr. Mom’ scenes feel dated, banking on an audience that finds male ineptitude silly, rather than simply frustrating.”

Title: The Miracle Club (2023)
Director: Thaddeus O'Sullivan 👨🏼🇮🇪
Writers: Joshua D. Maurer 👨🏼🇺🇸, Timothy Prager 👨🏼🇬🇧, and Jimmy Smallhorne 👨🏼🇮🇪

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

Technical: 3/5

Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club opens in 1967 Ballygar, a working class city just outside Dublin. Lifelong friends Eileen (Kathy Bates) and Lily (Maggie Smith) are joined by a neighbor and young mother named Dolly (Agnes O'Casey) as they make a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, to bathe in its healing waters. Each woman has her own hopes for a heavenly miracle, but when Chrissie (Laura Linney), the daughter of Eileen and Lily’s deceased friend, returns to Ballygar after 40 years abroad, she unearths painful memories upon joining the group.

Over the course of the film, the mysterious story between Eileen, Lily, and Chrissie is peeled back, one layer at a time. But with O’Sullivan’s insistence on feel-good sentimentality, it relinquishes gravitas. Like an old coat you bring back out for each winter, The Miracle Club envelops its audience with familiar human grievances and easy resolutions, foregoing any sense of daring or experimentation in the filmmaking. This doesn’t make it a difficult watch; anything Dame Maggie Smith graces is worth your time, and this is no different. But her entertaining role as a kindhearted and nervous woman may be the only reason it’s worth putting on.

Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Although the film follows a quartet of women, it’s written and directed by all men … and it shows. Yes, women are the main characters. And yes, it’s wonderful that the film focuses on friendship between women. But their bonds feel broadly sketched, powered only by the strength of performances by veteran actors like Smith and Bates. We’re told by the script that these women have decades of history: In a particularly obvious line, Chrissie says to Eileen, “You were my best friend.” Yet the rest of the film’s attempts at nuance, told through baleful silences punctuated by oblique and snarky asides, never quite mellow into the depths of things unsaid. As a result, its sporadic outbursts of action and exposition feel garish, too explicit in their telling of What Happened between Eileen, Lily, and Chrissie. The tonal swings feel false, wholly unlike the unique complexities that accrue in real life between women who’ve known, loved, and been hurt by each other across a gaping chasm of time.

In addition to the believability factor, the gender norms that appear in The Miracle Club also feel conveyed through a male perspective. On the one hand, it’s positive that each of the female protagonists are shown to be stalwarts in the home. They’re capable mothers (Dolly), master multi-taskers (Eileen), and sweetness incarnate (Lily). On the other hand, when each of these women dash off to Lourdes for the week, two of them leaving children behind, the fumbling “Mr. Mom” scenes that ensue feel dated. They bank on an audience that finds male ineptitude silly, rather than simply frustrating. Are we supposed to applaud Eileen’s husband for eventually learning how to feed his children? Is it funny that Dolly’s husband can’t figure out how to secure a nappy? These men quickly “learn their lessons” about how hard their wives work, but this realization only underlines how unfair it is when the women come home and greet their newly appreciative husbands with huge smiles, as if content to resume a life of unequal labor division so long as their husbands are appropriately thankful. The tidy bow wrapped around this issue of gender inequality evinces a core lack of understanding around what women really want and need from their partners—lasting change, not just a pat on the head.

Race: 1.5/5

While The Miracle Club’s all-white cast may reflect its 1960s Ballygar and Lourdes settings, there’s no reason why viewers can’t quietly note that the movies getting financed and greenlit—no small feat for any production, certainly—remain disproportionately white, both onscreen and behind the camera.

Bonus for Age: +1.00

With an age-diverse cast of Smith (88 at this time of review), Bates (75), Linney (59), and O’Casey (28), The Miracle Club is the uncommon movie that centers around an ensemble of women in their 50s, 70s, and 80s.

Hollywood continues to underrepresent women over 60 years old. Only 6% of speaking roles in recent top-grossing movies went to this group, when they comprised almost 10% of Ireland’s real-world population in 2016. So it’s positive that The Miracle Club recognizes the humanity and value of women in this age range.

—SPOILERS IN THE NEXT CATEGORY—

Bonus for Disability: +0.00

Part and parcel of aging is the accumulation of disabilities, which are normalized through a couple key characters. Lily has a limb difference and wears a platform boot. Midway through the movie, she over-exerts herself and needs help to get around. It’s a positive way for audiences to see a wheelchair being used as a freeing device—one that gets her to the baths when her alternative was staying behind at the hotel. And Eileen discovers a lump in her breast, going through various stages of denial and fear before eventually accepting that she needs to face her medical issue head-on.

Unfortunately, these positive portrayals are neutralized by the story arc for Dolly’s young son Daniel (Eric D. Smith). The boy doesn’t speak, and Dolly spends much of the film upset and terrified that he’ll never do so. While other characters exhibit a much more inclusive approach, recognizing that Daniel’s perfectly healthy regardless of whether or not he vocalizes, the film undercuts its own message by “miraculously” having Daniel speak at the end of the film. Seeing a disability spontaneously healed is a trope that The Miracle Club employs for a bit of inspirational whimsy, but filmmakers likely don’t realize how the narrative panders to a non-disabled audience and devalues people who aren’t able to vocalize, but who are perfectly fine just the way they are.

—END SPOILERS—

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.25/5

The Miracle Club’s inclusiveness stems mainly from its core premise of celebrating women across a wide swathe of generations. But nuance is missing, making this a tough sell on more than that. Regardless, Dame Maggie Smith is always a joy to watch, and on that front, she drags O’Sullivan’s otherwise uneventful writing and direction into a movie that’s worth your time.

Like The Miracle Club? Try these other Irish titles.

Grade: CLiJuly 11, 2023Great for: Age