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Until fairly recently, the Sisters of Mercy in Ireland ran the Magdalene Asylums, essentially slave-labor prisons for "wayward" girls. To qualify as wayward, you might have a child out of wedlock, or be raped by your cousin and watch your family turn its back on you, or simply be seen talking to boys too much at the orphanage. Those are the "sins" committed by the three lead characters: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), the rape victim; Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), the orphan; and Rose (Dorothy Duffy), who not only loses her newborn son but, upon arrival at Magdalene, her name. (There's already a Rose there, so she's called by her communion name Patricia.)

Miramax sold this as a triumph-of-the-human-spirit wedge of cheese, but it's a much tougher piece of work than that. Writer/director Peter Mullan, an actor making his second feature (he appears here as the viciously unforgiving father of a girl who has attempted escape), delivers a sobering drama with drab gray colors and symmetrical compositions right out of a Kubrick film; this is The Shawshank Redemption without the inspirational muck that always mars that film for me. There's very little redemption here, only suffering, humiliation, and the desperate need for escape. The prisoners here, after all, have done nothing much wrong except being female. To color even slightly outside the line of good-girlhood is to invite expulsion from the family and a hard cot at the asylum.

The Magdalene girls are required to work long hours every day of the year; the three protagonists toil in the laundry. As punishment for various infractions, the girls are beaten or have their heads shaved or, ultimately, are sent to a real asylum to be doped into submission. Even when the nuns who run the show are trying to have a little fun, there's the spectre of sadism, as in the bizarre scene where a group of the girls stand naked while two nuns bestow "awards" for the biggest breasts, hairiest bush, etc. And you definitely don't want to get on the bad side of Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan), a corrupt harridan who relishes the torment of her charges and justifies it all as the necessary penance of sinners.

Our heroines are not always heroic. Bernadette, for instance, is a sullen and rather callous girl who's probably had the hardest life of the three. She has a late-inning scene with an elderly asylum co-worker that might force some viewers to break their identification with her; but we see that kindness doesn't come easily to Bernadette, who may see her harshness as a hostile act of mercy. Another inmate, the psychologically fragile Crispina (Eileen Walsh in the film's standout performance), goes steadily downhill after the aforementioned humiliating "awards ceremony." Crispina's arc is the film's most helplessly tragic, sealing the movie with the most haunting image of desolation this year. She, too, is realistically drawn as an unstable and childish girl who isn't equipped to survive the rigors of Magdalene (which include sexual abuse by a priest).

The Magdalene Sisters gives one of its heroines an almost absurdly matter-of-fact release from bondage, as if to say that all it takes is one person on the outside (preferably male) to redeem you and rescue you, and heaven help the rest of the girls who don't have one. The other two make such a loud botch of their eventual escape that, oddly, it feels credible -- more so than a carefully planned Hollywood escape would have been. You get the feeling that Sister Bridget just watches them go, thinking to herself, Good riddance.

The movie ends happily for these three, but the movie is set in the mid-'60s, and a title at the end informs us that the Magdalene Asylums were in business until 1996, detaining more than 30,000 women before their last door was closed. This is a riveting piece of drama about a forgotten slice of history, no matter what the esteemed movie critics at the Vatican say about it.

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originally posted: 01/15/07 14:58:08
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