Philomena

After being together, and being kind of tightwad homebodies, for 20-odd years, Mary and I have watched so many movies, that we have grown a little tired of them. Mary, in particular, rarely cares whether we watch anything at all on a weekend night.  As I'm sure I have blogged before, we long ago fell into the practice of watching half of a movie on Friday night and if -- if and only if -- we found it compelling, watching the rest of it on Saturday night.

Often we get discs from Netflix and let them linger in the Almirah drawer below the TV for months. Such was the case with the 2013 Stephen Frears film Philomena, which Mary had put on our list because it had won some prizes.

But this was a very very good film, and it restored my faith in directors, and made me want to start digging around and looking for good filmic stories again. It tells the story -- based on actual events -- of an Irish flack/journalist type who gets fired from a pretty high level government job and is down on himself. He gets paired up with an older woman, in this case Dame Judy Dench, who had had a child out of wedlock when she was young, and had done so within the auspices of an evil nunnery, who gave the kid away, as per their business model. They team up to find out what happened to the kid, and in the process find themselves, blah blah blah.  Sounds corny, but it is masterfully done.

We watched the whole thing. We laughed, we cried.

Rent it.