Film Review: THE MIRACLE CLUB (2023): Thaddeus O’Sullivan Delivers a Heartwarming Little Gem with a Fine Cast

The Miracle Club Review

The Miracle Club (2023) Film Review, a movie directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, written by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne and starring Laura Linney, Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Agnes O’Casey, Mark O’Halloran, Stephen Rea, Mark McKenna, Hazel Doupe, Niall Buggy, Lesley Conroy, Janet Grene, Shauna Higgins, Martin McDonagh and Fionnuala Murphy.

Laura Linney stars in director Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s heartfelt and moving little drama, The Miracle Club. Set in the late 1960’s, a woman named Chrissie (Linney) returns to a small Dublin village called Ballygar after her mother’s passing. There is a history that Chrissie carries with her and, over the course of this film, she finds a new purpose and comes to terms with her challenging past. The Miracle Club is the type of film that independent film audiences will appreciate and it has other high-profile cast members that include the always terrific Kathy Bates and the incomparable Maggie Smith.

Bates and Smith portray Eileen Dunn and Lily Fox, a pair of aging women looking for some kind of peace in their current lives. Eileen is married to a man (Stephen Rea) who only sometimes seems to understand her and the sacrifices she has made to raise a family. Lily’s past involves a former relationship with Chrissie that is very complex in nature. Also joining the unbeatable cast is Agnes O’Casey as Dolly, a woman with a couple of kids and a husband who doesn’t seem to understand her desires in life. Dolly wants to hear her son say something. Dolly’s boy has not been speaking and this concerns Dolly greatly.

When our four central women finally all get together on a bus headed to the town of Lourdes, they are expecting to find a sort of miracle that will be able to help them make sense of their complicated lives. Eileen has found a lump that could be suspicious while Lily has never seemed to grasp why she had to lose her son Declan at such an early age. Chrissie is the one who doesn’t seem to fit in with the other women at first for very specific reasons.

An intriguing scene within the film is also a bit humorous in nature. It involves the discovery of healing water which is supposed to lead to miracles. When Eileen immerses herself in the water, she expects big things while Dolly tries to bring her son into the water as well. Our ladies find out that the water has only performed well less than a hundred miracles over the past 100 years so they shouldn’t be too dependent on finding immediate satisfaction in their lives quite yet.

It’s the quieter moments in the film which stand out such as when Chrissie and some other characters do the old dance called the “Hokey Pokey” in the background. Also particularly strong are the awkward moments where Chrissie feels like, perhaps, she shouldn’t have come back for her mom’s funeral. Her mother has left her a note and it seems like too little, too late for Chrissie in terms of her coming back to town. However, there is a lot of bonding for Chrissie to do with Eileen and, especially, Lily which could teach her a thing or two about self forgiveness and appreciating being around others.

The real surprise of this movie isn’t how great Linney, Smith and Bates are, it’s how wonderful Agnes O’Casey is as Dolly, the mom who challenges her husband to do what is right for her son. This is a star-making role for O’Casey against some heavy-hitters that O’Casey more than holds her own beside. Dolly is a well-written and earnest character who wants to find fulfillment and can’t settle for the mundane life which seems to have been handed to her. She wants more, especially for her children and learns a bit about herself and her friends along the way.

Bates is predictably top notch in one of her most nuanced recent performances. Smith and Linney share some great scenes together where they ache and hurt emotionally over the events that have occurred in the past. While this hurt is great, the healing power of friendship takes center stage as the movie progresses to its conclusion where all these women have learned a bit more about themselves and characters like Eileen’s husband and Dolly’s husband discover that there is much more to appreciate about their wives than they originally realized.

For whatever reason, Linney is the glue that holds this movie together. Chrissie is fully fleshed out as a character who is flawed but has humanity within her soul that makes her a person of character who needs to find her reason to live again. She had given up a bit on life previously and, ultimately, finds some sort of happy medium in her life. Another notable performance is that of Mark O’Halloran as Fr Dermot Byrne while Rea gets some moments to stand out when his character cooks a dinner for his family that they hilariously don’t seem too happy to be eating because it’s not very appetizing.

The Miracle Club is a small success for the talent involved in terms of pacing, plot structure and character development. It is a larger success on the basis of the quality of the acting. It’s always great to see Linney working again and Agnes O’Casey is an actress to put on your radar. She deserves a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in this movie and one can only hope enough people see it to get her into the race.

Rating: 7.5/10

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