3.5 Razors

• Title: Philomena
• IMDB: link

Based on a true story, Philomena involves the odd pairing of a former journalist turned disgraced government advisor and elderly Irish woman on a road trip to discover what happened to the child that was taken from her nearly 50 years ago. Although initially not interested in a human interest piece, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) finds himself drawn into Philomena Lee’s (Judi Dench) story of her forced labor at a convent decades earlier whose nuns sold her child, and those of several other unwed mothers, into adoption for 1000 pounds.

Beginning at the convent, whose inability to help Sixsmith is immediately suspicious of, the pair eventually travel to Washington, D.C. in a search that will give the old woman some insight into the man her son became. Centered around Dench’s performance and the saintly, but not cheesy or overly sentimental, character of Philomena, the film could have easily fallen into the worst kind of TV movie of the week melodrama. Instead Stephen Frears chooses to make a straightforward drama that works well (despite its over-reliance on the odd couple dynamic).

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