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Purely Joyful Movie!

Powerful

Did you people see the same film I saw?

Best movie ever!

Brilliant played and absolutely fantastic written.

This BBC film has everything I would want for a great movie. Martin Sixsmith's book is powerfully told. The screenplay is outstanding. The Direction by Stephen Frears is done at an excellent pace. Judi Dench and Steve Coogan make a power team as Philomena and Martin Sixsmith. The supporting cast is fine, but this film belongs too these main characters. Story is about a young teenager (Philomena played by Sophie Kennedy Clark) who has an erotic encounter with a young man, becomes pregnant and is taken in by a convent where she delivers a baby boy. The nuns, in 1952, were in the business of delivering single underage teenage girls babies and then selling them for adoption to rich folks (mostly Americans) in Scotland. The location settings for this in Northern Ireland, the UK, and the US make for many great settings as beckoned for the story. Baed upon a true story, Philomena, 50 years after having her baby, wants to find him after the nuns sold her little boy away from her over 50 years prior. Sixsmith, a former BBC reporter who has been fired, gets involved to try and help find Philomena's son. This takes them from Rocrea in Scotland, to the United States. While watching the first half of the movie, the viewer feels like she will, and there will be a happy ending.Then, she finds out her son is dead, and why. Actually Michael Sixsmith leads her to find out where her son is. Rocrea nunnery in Scotland is no help and is actually the ultimate road block to Philomena finding out where her son was and who he was sold too.The emotion of the story is raised by the process, very old fashioned, balanced against the group of folks wanting to learn who he really was. It is a story we can not put down and at slightly over 90 minutes does not let the viewer escape without touching moments in the film. It is all quite adorable really.

Based on a true story, 'Philomena' (on TV, 26 02 16) mixes documentary realism, a mystery story and comedy with consummate success. At its heart is the striking contrast between the journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), portrayed as a cynical 'hack' and atheist, and Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), a devout Catholic, seemingly simple yet thoroughly clear-headed.The story looks back to 1952, when Philomena's father sent her to a convent as punishment for having a child out of wedlock. It portrays Ireland at that time far more harshly than 'Brooklyn' (also set in 1952). The nuns subject Philomena and other girls to a shockingly Spartan regime reminiscent of pre-Revolutionary French convents in Diderot's novel 'La religieuse' (filmed most recently in 2013). Worse still, they have no compunction in selling the girls' babies. It's sobering to think that their appallingly misguided practices could have taken place in such relatively recent times.Sister Hildegarde (Barbara Jefford), superior of the convent in 1952, embodies one of three variations on the theme of Catholicism. She is an unyielding fundamentalist, for whom sexual relations are 'carnal incontinence'. At the opposite extreme, Martin Sixsmith is a lapsed Catholic who bitterly detests the Church. Philomena, by contrast with both those characters, not only keeps her faith but practises it – heroically so in one case. So the story is essentially fair to the Catholic Church.By the time of the main action, 2002, Sister Hildegarde is very old and frail. Mother Barbara (Ruth McCabe), her successor at the time, is completely different: quite young, dressed in an unobtrusive habit and caring in her manner. It's also striking that one of the nuns (played by Wunmi Mosaku) is black.Sixsmith has temporarily abandoned his specialist field of Russian history for investigative journalism. In that role, he's accountable to his editor, who is really no more humane than Sister Hildegarde. When he tells her on the phone that Philomena is 'in bits' over her long-lost son's fate in the USA, she crows with delight.His investigation makes the film partly a mystery story. Its outcome is a great surprise, linking Ireland and the USA well after 1952.Judi Dench is thoroughly convincing as a talkative, warm-hearted and sometimes slightly embarrassing Irish woman. One of her most endearing traits is the way she repeats the name Martin in her conversations with him. Like her, Steve Coogan achieves some very subtle changes of attitude, mood and pace. There's just one touch, I think, of Alan Partridge when Sixsmith makes an awkwardly suggestive quip to Mother Barbara on seeing photos of Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield.This film struck me as profoundly moving and I felt the tears welling up more than once. Yet another fine piece of work from Stephen Frears, and full credit to Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope for the screenplay.

Hess's birth mother was Philomena Lee. Lee became pregnant at age 18 at a local carnival by a man named John who worked for the post office. She was then sent to the Sean Ross Abbey, a place for unwed mothers, in Roscrea in Ireland. After she gave birth to Hess, she was able to be with her child until she was 22 and he was three while living in the Abbey. As was common practice in Ireland at the time, the church sold him to a Catholic family in the United States. Lee did not know where her son was sent by the nuns when she left the Abbey after being forced into signing the adoption papers. Hess grew up in the Midwest and was raised in a Catholic family. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1974 and earned a law degree at George Washington University. He made three visits to Ireland to try to find his mother but was unsuccessful in persuading the sisters to divulge any information. He requested that his ashes be buried at the convent where he was born in the hope that his mother would eventually be able to find his grave. Hess never learned who his mother was. In the 2000s, journalist Martin Sixsmith, working with Lee, discovered that Hess was Lee's son. My whole body is still shaking from the anger I feel after watching this film. So typical of a cult like the catholic church to have lied and stolen and profited from selling this lady's child. He did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, particularly in his professional life. He died from complications of AIDS, although this was not mentioned at the memorial service held for him. Hess's partner for the last 15 years of his life was Steve Dahllof. Dahllof credited the book The Lost Child of Philomena Lee with "about a three out of 10, in terms of accuracy", while the movie Philomena, "in accuracy of spirit, is 10 out of 10. A must C film.