Aubrey Malone
The Secret Scripture (12A)
This curious film, based on Sebastian Barry’s Booker Prize nominated novel, will confirm watchers in the view that over-arching anti-clericalism seems increasingly prevalent in films today. Many of them seem to delight in shining a laser on Ireland’s dark past, especially in the treatment of vulnerable young women, especially vulnerable young women pregnant outside marriage – or even inside marriage.
The Secret Scripture has been deservedly lauded for its excellent evocation of rural Ireland during and after World War II and also for the intense performance of Vanessa Redgrave as Rose McNulty, a distraught woman placed in a mental institution for over 50 years on a dubious pretext.
Rooney Mara gives an equally enticing performance as Rose in her younger years. Branded as a nymphomaniac by a priest simply because she captures the attentions of the local men, she alienates herself further from the near-obsessive Fr Gaunt (Theo James) when she falls in love with a dashing young pilot, Michael Eneas (Jack Reynor).
Michael joins the RAF. The fact that he’s shot down just yards away from where she lives is just one of the film’s far-fetched incidents that we’re expected to swallow without question.
Rose marries Michael and shelters him from locals who are out for his blood – presumably because he’s been fighting with ‘the Brits’ – though this, along with many other things in the film, isn’t explained.
Rose now becomes pregnant. The scorn of the community, one day she swims to a cave where she gives birth to a son. She then appears to throttle him.
This scene is one of the most confusing in an extremely confusing film. Her character calls up echoes of everyone from Ann Lovett to Joanne Hayes (of the Kerry Babies imbroglio).
She’s accused of murder and incarcerated in the asylum. Here she undergoes horrendous electric shock treatments. She also writes ‘the truth’ of what happened in the margins of her pocket Bible. Thus The Book of Job becomes The Book of Rose.
The film moves backwards and forwards in time. Flashbacks alternate with the present.
Eric Bana plays a kind psychiatrist who reviews her case as he decides whether she’s to be transferred to another facility – this one is about to be demolished – or released into the community.
Surprise
There’s a surprise at the end which is the stuff of soap opera. An impressive Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ gives way to a song by Kelly Clarkson, reducing matters to mainstream Hollywood tearjerker land.
Somewhat like The Magdalene Sisters crossed with Philomena in tone, my feeling is that the film will polarise viewers on many scores, hardening entrenched positions on both sides of the ecclesiastical – and feminist – divide.
Surprisingly for director Jim Sheridan it suffers from a lack of focus, making it into a familiar tirade against institutional abuses of yore instead of the poignant love story it could have been with a little less agitprop and a little more blance.
Fair **