'Magdalene Sisters' a chilling look at sadistic nuns

Friday, August 29, 2003

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

The abuse of minors, in one form or another, has become a hot topic in the movies over the past year.

	'The Magdalene Sisters' RATING: R for violence/cruelty, nudity, sexual content and language. STARRING: Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy, Eileen Walsh. DIRECTOR: Peter Mullan.

We've had delinquent kids forced to dig through sand in the desert heat in "Holes," the Australian government sanctioning the removal of mixed-race children from Aboriginal families in "Rabbit-Proof Fence," the corruption of Brazilian ghetto life in "City of God." You could even count the enforced servitude of the 10-year-old girl in the animated "Spirited Away" and Depression parents selling their son into the jockey's life in "Seabiscuit."

The Catholic Church or its representatives figure prominently as villains in several other recent films, and you can't blame Hollywood for these. "The Crime of Father Amaro," produced in Mexico, features a young priest having an affair with a teen-age parishioner. "Evelyn," produced in Ireland, centers on a 1950s father suing to overturn a law that allowed the church to take his children without his consent and place them in religious orphanages.

Now comes "The Magdalene Sisters," set in the 1960s, which looks at young women imprisoned (there's no other word for it) in a network of Irish laundries presided over by an order of nuns whose idea of punishment was far harsher than a ruler across the knuckles. What offenses brought these inmates here? One of the movie's central characters had a baby out of wedlock. One was raped by her cousin. One attracted too much attention from the local boys through nothing more than flirting.

As the fearsome Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan) explains, all men are sinners. The girls are being punished for tempting them. The Taliban couldn't have rationalized it better. Jesus preached forgiveness, but few people in this film -- including the nuns and some of the parents of the "fallen women" -- seem to have any notion of the concept.

Both "Evelyn" and "The Magdalene Sisters" are based on actual events, although the former is lighter in tone -- despite some edgy scenes, it betrays more than a touch o' the blarney. "The Magdalene Sisters" is all business.

It reveals gradually the sadistic nature of the nuns and unfolds at what seems like a naturalistic pace -- until we are shocked when someone says a year has gone by since what we thought was a recent incident. Like these luckless women, we are supposed to forget about time's passage, although it seems obvious some of the residents have been here a very long time.

The movie's considerable power derives not merely from the injustice of the situation but largely from the emotional magma bubbling to the surface in these characters, building to inevitable but unpredictable eruptions.

This is particularly true of the "flirt," Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), a hothead with resentment smoldering in her eyes, especially when she takes it out on a dying woman. Anne-Marie Duff as Margaret, the rape victim, and Dorothy Duffy as Rose, the unwed mother, are effective counterpoints, quieter but no less angry. Then there is Eileen Walsh as Crispina, an awkward girl who seems to be going over the edge.

Yet one wonders about the nuns in the movie as well. They couldn't have been born so cruel. Was the calling their answer to not being a temptation to men? Is the meanness an overreaction or even a release? Were they coerced in some way?

"The Magdalene Sisters" would have been a better movie had it tried to answer those questions. But Mullan will not cut the authority figures a break. When Sister Bridget interviews the three new girls, she is counting money all the while. I thought of Yubaba the witch interviewing little Chihiro in "Spirited Away." While the girls are eating gruel at breakfast, they can see the nuns in the next room feasting on sausages and ham and jellied toast. In another scene, two nuns make the girls exercise in the nude and then make fun of their bodies.

The local priest proves no better, and the scene in which he gets his comeuppance is contrived for shock value as it literally strips him of all dignity. But it ends with one of the film's most indelible moments, when one of the girls screams at him repeatedly, "You are not a man of God!"

At one point in the movie, the nuns arrange a screening of "The Bells of St. Mary's" for Christmas day. But no longer are we sentimental about either children or nuns, it seems. "The Magdalene Sisters" qualifies as that film's polar opposite.

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