The Magdalene Sisters   

Directed and Written by Peter Mullan

Starring: Geraldine McEwan, Anne-Marie Duff, Nora-Jane Noone, Dorothy Duffy and Eileen Walsh

Rated R for violence/cruelty, nudity, sexual content and language

119 minutes run time

At a time when everybody is taking their shots at the Catholic Church it is easy to write off this movie as opportunistic.  Quite to the contrary, “The Magdalene Sisters” should help understand the position in which the church has found itself.

On a superficial level the movie is an attack on an anachronistic institution grown too fat on its own wealth and power.  The Magdalene Sisters is a convent in 1960’s Ireland dedicated to the confinement of “wayward girls.”  The wayward girls could be guilty of having children out of wedlock, or of simply being too forward, or of simply being victimized, themselves.  The convent serves the function of our “reform schools,” but there is a big difference between the two as political entities.  The convent is under the authority of the church, not the state.  Girls were placed there by their guardians and the local pastor, in secret.  The girls would simply disappear and be off to do their penance for as long as one or two persons felt was appropriate.

Juveniles are placed in our reform schools by courts run according to our constitution.  Our laws mandate the public filing of charges and public trials as part of any procedure leading to incarceration.  These laws protect us from arbitrary imprisonment.  But they serve another purpose as well: to protect our leaders from themselves.

This movie is about secret imprisonment and the effect such an abuse of power has on captors as well as captives.  It is the true story of four incarcerated girls and the head-mistress of Magdalene, Sister Bridget, played by Geraldine McEwan (Mortianna in the 1991 “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves”).  McEwan and director/writer Peter Mullan resisted the temptation to portray Sister Bridget as simply a power-mad psycho intent on torturing her helpless charges.  Rather, she is portrayed as a woman dedicated to the church to the point where she knows no other law.  She punishes the girls not with the assurance of a dictator, but with the frantic spasms of a criminal on the run; dreading that someday her secrets will out.  Dreading that her life may be her damnation instead of her salvation.

Sister Bridget is held captive as surely as are the girls.  “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and she is corrupted by the absolute power of her position, as is the rapist-priest who preys on her charges, and two sexually deviant sisters who satisfy their own mis-directed libidos at the expense of their prisoners.  Who are the real victims here?  At least the prisoners know who to blame and who to fight.  The curse on their captors is that they know nothing other than their own increasing feelings of self-hatred; nothing other than their own dread of the future, even within the promise of eternal paradise.

When Rose is given the chance to escape she declines, so effective is her brain-washing.  In a scene of remarkable power, Rose sees a door in the wall of the convent and opens it to the outside.  The camera shows the lush fields of Ireland framed in the coarse wooden frame of the door, its timbers like those of the cross Christ bore to Cavalry.  Rose ventures outside only briefly, but quickly returns to the familiar surroundings of her keep.  As she is, eventually, dressing to leave, Rose says to the others with a sense of awe, “It’s just that simple.”

The Magdalene Sisters convent did not do laundry for free.  They were paid for the labor of their captives.  The girls themselves received nothing, but the convent prospered through the combination of church protection and free labor.  This is not the first movie in this vein, “The Shawshank Redemption” showed the same thing happening in 1940s Maine.  In that movie, the prison warden is drawn into corruption by the state-provided opportunity to apply prison labor to public-sector work projects.  This seemingly “common-sense” plan eventually pits free inmate labor against the paid labor of the open market, leading to pay-offs by local contractors to the prison warden to not compete for certain jobs.  The end result is the spiritual destruction of the warden.  Absolute power was the trap unwittingly laid for him by the state, and he fell into it.  The same power is the trap unwittingly laid for the sisters of Magdalene Convent, and they suffer the same fate.  The girls are imprisoned by higher powers, but their captors’ guilt makes the prisoners’ release unthinkable to the nuns, just as the innocent Andy Dufresne’s release from Shawshank becomes unthinkable to Warden Norton after he forces Defresne’s complicity in his crimes.

The filming of “The Magdalene Sisters” takes place almost entirely indoors, in the forbidding confines of the convent.  The sound is accented to enhance the echoic hardness of the surroundings.  In scenes where the girls run to escape, the clatter of their shoes on the seemingly iron floors rings from the ceilings like the baying of hounds on the hunt.  As Rose opens the door through the wall to the outside, the audience is shocked all over again by the previous sixty minutes of nothing but confinement.  Like the scene in “The Truman Show,” director Mullan has used the power of film to create two simultaneous worlds: the one outside and the one inside.  Which one will they choose?  Which one will we choose?

This film is definitely worth seeing, but the R rating is for real.  Leave the kids at home.