PHILOMENA

Reader, I knew him. By ‘him’ I mean Martin Sixsmith, the haughty BBC correspondent who became a supercilious spin doctor in the Department of Environment and Transport during the Blair years, which I covered as part of my day job.

I recall someone who was far too important to speak to the likes of me, a humble hack, and I recall being mildly amused when a mildly tasteless joke about burying bad news caused him to ‘be resigned’.

To come upon him in a docudrama was very intriguing, especially as portrayed by Alan Partridge – oops, Steve Coogan. Adding to the fascination was the fact that Coogan, who also co-wrote the screenplay, captured him perfectly, down to the lack of interest in ordinary people, which nearly caused him to miss Philomena’s story altogether.

Philomena Lee, an Irish woman in her 70s, became pregnant as a teenager in 1952. Her father threw out the ‘fallen woman’ and, in the second half of the 20th century she became a slave in a convent in Roscrea, Co Tipperary, where the sisters punished her for the bitter emptiness of their own lives.

Alongside others in her situation she was made to work in the laundry for seven days a week and only allowed access to her child, Anthony, for one hour a day. When he was three, Anthony was sold for £1,000 for adoption to an American family that Philomena was never allowed to meet. She spent the next 50 years trying in vain to find him. As the nuns and priests lied, lied and lied again, she would have died believing he hated her, had it not been for a chance meeting between her daughter and Sixsmith at a drinks party.



The film would have been fascinating anyway, as a study of how lives can still be poisoned and destroyed in the name of religion. But it’s made irresistible by Philomena being depicted by the glorious Dame Judi Dench. As the cameras close up on every line and wrinkle in her face, under sad hair, she becomes M’s dotty Irish auntie.

At first Sixsmith/Coogan is nonplussed. He is only concerned with the humaninterest story, without being interested in the human before him. But as he and Philomena travel together to America, he a seasoned traveller, she a complete novice, Sixsmith undergoes an epiphany and is born again as a human being, while Philomena finally overcomes her blind loyalty to the Church, which cruelly sold her out.

The story, being a real one, is full of twists and turns but underlying it all are Coogan and Dench acting their hearts out.

In the final scene, in an Irish graveyard, Steve Coogan finally lays his alter ego, Partridge, to rest. RIP.