Posted on 08/02/2003 11:34:41 AM PDT by Calpernia
Peter Mullan couldn't have dreamed up better publicity. His movie, "The Magdalene Sisters," was having its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last September, and Italy's Catholic establishment had loudly condemned it.
A critic for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano called it "an angry and rancorous provocation" and Turin Cardinal Ersilio Tonini, who admitted he hadn't seen the film, accused Mullan of poisoning the film with an anti- Catholic "agenda."
The object of their wrath, "The Magdalene Sisters," is a fact-based drama about a network of Catholic asylums, active in Ireland until 1996, that imprisoned prostitutes, unwed mothers and "fallen women." Forced to work as unpaid slaves in laundries, the young women -- some rape victims, some guilty of no crime other than being attractive to boys -- were often incarcerated for life.
Survivors report harrowing tales of degradation, physical and sexual abuse. In Cork, Ireland, a mass grave was discovered, but the Sisters of Mercy, which administered the asylums, refuses to disclose the names of the dead.
Mullan, who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, says he anticipated denials from the Vatican, but never expected they'd be so careless and non-strategic as to give him mountains of free publicity. In Venice, priests holding video cameras approached audience members, saying, "You are aware that to watch this film is to commit a sin?"
"I was amazed at how dumb they were," says Mullan, 43, a slight, tightly wound Scotsman who divides his career between acting ("Trainspotting," "Braveheart") and directing ("Orphans"). "Absolutely amazed." Thanks to the controversy, Italians showed up in droves for "The Magdalene Sisters" and kept it on box-office charts for 15 weeks. All that for a low-budget indie from Scotland.
The film, set in Dublin between 1964 and 1968, was such a sensation in Italy that it stayed in the headlines for three weeks. Italian reporters were dispatched to Ireland to find women who had survived the Magdalene institutions, and then wrote large exposes running five newspaper pages.
Mullan had touched a nerve. But when "The Magdalene Sisters" opened in Ireland in February, and he braced himself for a torrent of denials, the Catholic Church said nothing. "Absolutely nothing! My theory is that they thought, 'Well, it didn't work in Italy to condemn it, so let's have the people jump to our defense. We'll be discreet and stand back.' "
"Obviously, that never happened." The press coverage was enormous: "A tough, emotionally loaded and deeply unsettling drama," wrote Irish Times film critic Michael Dwyer. "The timing of its release in cinemas around the country couldn't have come at a worse time for the Catholic Church, already desperately trying to come to grips with the fall-out from (revelations on) clerical sex abuse," wrote journalist Miriam Donohue.
When the film opened in Scotland, where Mullan lives with his wife, writer Annie Swann, and their three children, there wasn't a trace of controversy. The spokesman for the Archbishop of Glasgow called the film "painful viewing," but recommended that Catholics see the film, Mullan says, "as an act of contrition, a means of moving forward. So between September and February there's a 180-degree turn in how the church is saying the Catholic community should respond to this film."
Mullan, whose performance in Ken Loach's "My Name is Joe" earned him Best Actor honors at Cannes, was reared in a working-class section of Glasgow. One of eight children born to an alcoholic father, he was Catholic and therefore stigmatized as "Irish" in a Protestant country. Mullan grew up with a sharp sense of social injustice, read Marx and Engels and Karl Jung, and became the first in his family to attend university.
A man of constant motion, Mullan gestures, fidgets, laughs freely and sips from a glass of Merlot during an animated lunch in a downtown San Francisco restaurant. A gregarious man, he loves to talk, speaking in a thick, gravelly Glaswegian burr. The word "Irish" comes out sounding like "OY-rish," "theory" like "THEE-ree," "church" like "charch" and "murder" like "MAH-durr."
Mullan denies that "The Magdalene Sisters" is anti-Catholic. He considers himself a "recovering Catholic," sends his children to Catholic schools and says the target of his film is the abuse of power. "It's about all fundamentalist faiths that think they have the right to oppress young women," he said when accepting his award in Venice.
"The Magdalene Sisters" was inspired, Mullan says, by "Sex in a Cold Climate," a Channel 4 documentary by Steve Humphries, broadcast in 1997. Watching at home one night, Mullan was alarmed to learn of young women working 8 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week without pay. Upon entry, their hair was shorn, their belongings removed and their names replaced by the names of Catholic saints. No contact with family or the outside world was allowed.
The nuns who operated the asylums lectured on the wages of sin and sexual congress, and yet the girls were sometimes raped by visiting priests and sworn to silence. The power of the church was so strong, Mullan says, and the complicity of the state and the public so widespread, that the truth of the asylums remained an official secret.
Mullan interviewed dozens of survivors and conflated their stories into four characters: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), surrendered to the asylum after being raped at a family wedding; Rose (Dorothy Duff), marked by an illegitimate child that she's not allowed to keep; Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), a fiery orphan who rebels against brutal authority; and Crispina (Eileen Walsh), a simple girl forced into sexually servicing a priest.
In a part originally set for Vanessa Redgrave, who dropped out for family reasons, Geraldine McEwan plays Sister Bridget, the sinister head of the asylum. Phyllis McMahon, a former nun who actually worked in a Magdalene institution in Galway, Ireland, from 1959 to 1961, plays one of the Magdalene sisters.
"She was our technical adviser -- about the prayers they would use, the length of the rosary, the degree of physical violence," Mullan says. "I was worried about the Crispina story and asked her if the nuns would have the right to put her into a mental asylum without a doctor's authorization. She said, 'Oh, God, it's as you've got in the script. The nuns say, "Take her away" and she's taken away. No questions asked.' "
McMahon also told a story of one crafty girl who feigned insanity to escape a life of imprisonment. Once she was committed to a mental asylum, a psychiatrist examined her, determined she was sane and let her go. Feeling triumphant, the girl moved to London and sent a letter to the Mother Superior at the Magdalene: "Dear bitch from hell," it began.
Although the Catholic Church has apologized for the brutal history of the Magdalene asylums, Mullan says, "they need to follow the apology with hardcore information (about the survivors) that we then have to sift through."
Having worked on "The Magdalene Sisters" for three and a half years years -- he gave up lucrative acting jobs in "Billy Elliot" and "Gangs of New York" to make the film -- Mullan is harsh, unforgiving in his assessment of the Catholic Church and its response to the Magdalene revelations.
"The church still works in this bizarre policy of a man who just can't stop knockin' down kids with his car. He apologizes eventually for every kid he knocked down, but you never get to ask him, 'What speed were you driving at? Have you done this before? Were you drinking?'
"The church is the guy in the car that says, 'I said I'm sorry. That's enough, isn't it?' And then drives off."
WHEN the Scottish actor and director Peter Mullan was growing up in a working-class Roman Catholic family, goodness was embodied in the clergy. It was the clergy of his pious mother, who contended with eight children and an alcoholic husband. It was the clergy of the Hollywood films the Mullan children watched on television: "Boys Town" with Spencer Tracy, "Angels With Dirty Faces" with Pat O'Brien, "Going My Way" with Bing Crosby.
[the reason for the producer's angst] Goodness, however, was not apparent in the local priest when the family's electricity was shut off, and Mrs. Mullan sent her son to the church for candles. "The priest got hold of me, and started beating me up," Mr. Mullan recalled over coffee last fall, when he was in town for the New York Film Festival screening of his second feature, "The Magdalene Sisters." "His first reaction was that I'd broken into his house to steal the candelabra. Then he told me that the reason we were so poor was that my father was useless." Through "blinding tears," the 10-year-old boy looked at the priest and thought, "You're no Spencer Tracy."
Fast forward to a night in March 1998. By then Mr. Mullan had taught European drama at the University of Glasgow; he had directed community theater with "every group imaginable — prisoners, murderers, abused men, abused women, unemployed, employed," he said; and he had acted in several films, including Mel Gibson's "Braveheart," Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting" and Ken Loach's "My Name Is Joe" (for which he won the prize for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival). He had also recently directed his first film, "Orphans," a dark comedy, set in Glasgow, about four adult siblings whose pent-up rage explodes the night before their mother's funeral.
That March evening, Mr. Mullan watched a television documentary called "Sex in a Cold Climate," which aimed a bright light on a previously hidden part of the Catholic Church's domain, the Magdalene Asylums. Functioning as both girls' reformatories and profit-making laundries, the Magdalenes were virtual prisons for thousands of young women, condemned, by the church or their families, to labor under sweat-shop conditions as punishment for their "crimes," which ranged from being dangerously pretty to having babies before they had husbands. "Mary Magdalene was forgiven, and we would be forgiven in time," one woman said she was told by the nuns who ran the asylums, which first opened near the end of the 19th century and, in Britain, were located primarily near the large cities.
"Sex in a Cold Climate" enraged Mr. Mullan, and he wrote the outline for his own film in a day and a half, he said. His rage is evident in every frame of "The Magdalene Sisters," which opens in theaters on Friday. The film is a stark portrayal of abuse, of existences limited to silent, daylong toil and silent, miserly meals, with the ever-present threat of sadistic beatings for any infraction of the rules.
The movie, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September, introduces its three main characters with brief vignettes detailing their falls from respectable girlhood. It is 1964. As musicians play traditional Irish songs at a festive wedding, a cousin pulls Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) into an upstairs room and rapes her; she tells what happened, and in the next scene, she is awakened in the early dawn by her father and bundled into a car with a priest. Then the film jumps to the lying-in hospital where Rose (Dorothy Duffy) has just given birth to a boy; her mother sits beside her, too furious even to look at him, and in short order, the infant is handed over to a priest for adoption and Rose is handed over to the Magdalene. These two girls are made de facto orphans for having shamed their families; Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), the third, is an orphan in the literal sense. At 16, she is growing sexier by the day; the younger girls in the orphanage idolize her; local boys ogle her from the other side of the fence: clearly it's time for a stricter institution. The three girls arrive at a Magdalene on the outskirts of Dublin the same day, and together meet their nemesis-to-be, Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan). (Although the film is set in Ireland, it was made in Scotland, partly, Mr. Mullan says, because he feared "acts of sabotage.") Sister Bridget punishes the girls by whipping their thighs and shearing their heads. She revels in the money her laundry brings in, and presides over breakfast feasts with the other nuns while the girls eat a ghastly porridge. One British critic, reviewing Ms. McEwan's "simply glorious performance," called her Sister Bridget "the glitteringly cruel and cantankerous empress of emotional sadism."
Bernadette is the most headstrong of the girls, and much of the film's plot centers on her attempts to escape. Ms. Noone, who makes a stunning professional debut in the role, grew up in Ireland, in County Galway. "There was a Magdalene in Galway, right in the center of town," she recalled in a telephone interview. "Pretty much everyone knew that the bad girls went to the Magdalene. But people didn't talk about it; nobody wanted to say anything bad about the Catholic Church."
Mr. Mullan, 43, is not so reticent. He has graying blond hair and a mischievous glimmer in his eyes, and speaks in a gruff voice that belies his warm, self-deprecating humor. (So does the role he gave himself in the film: that of a vicious father who returns his daughter to the Magdalene after she escapes.) The last of the Magdalene asylums closed in 1996, done in not by their injustice but by technology, said Mr. Mullan, a Socialist. "Washing machines shut them down," he said. It's estimated that they had housed some 30,000 women in Ireland alone. "But it could be twice that," Mr. Mullan said. "The Catholic Church are the only ones who really know."
Mr. Mullan's empathy for these victims of the church goes beyond the memories of his own beating by the parish priest. "I think it goes back to my relationship with my father," he said. "I could relate to living in a prison with an open door. Technically speaking, 50 girls could have overpowered 15 nuns. But if you did escape, your family or the police brought you back. And you can't kill yourself; as a Catholic, that's damning your eternal soul. So they had you every way."
Sister Bridget, he said, is based on a nun Mr. Mullan worked for when he was 17, after he responded to an appeal in a Catholic newspaper for volunteers to help schizophrenic single women. "I wanted to do good," he said. But the program was administered by a nun whose "cruelty had to be seen to be believed — the arrogance, the vanity, the delusion, all of which was reinforced by society, even in a secular country," he recalled. "Nobody questioned a nun." Mr. Mullan summed up Sister Bridget in two brief phrases: "Absence of doubt. And everything has been sanctioned by God."
Ms. McEwan, who was brought up in England, said by telephone that she was "absolutely appalled" by the character when she read the script. "I was concerned that Sister Bridget not come out a total villain," she said. "Sister Bridget is a believer. She thinks it's a mortal sin for women to commit adultery and have a child out of wedlock; she absolutely believes she's saving them from themselves. But she's a very lonely woman. She's intelligent — nobody in her environment matches her mentally. She's sexually frustrated; she's innately jealous of the girls' sexuality, and that encourages her to be sadistic to them."
For all that, Mr. Mullan said he did not see "Magdalene Sisters" as anti-Catholic (and, he pointed out, one of his three children attends Catholic school). To him, the film is critical of "all theocracies," of "fundamentalist fiefdoms." (At a news conference when the film was shown in Venice, he had likened the Irish church's treatment of women to the Taliban's.) "Can you imagine thinking teenage girls can bring about the fall of the empire?" he asked.
The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, wasn't quite convinced. It called the film "an angry and rancorous provocation," and denounced its presentation as "a work of art" at the Venice festival.
Speaking by phone earlier this month, Mr. Mullan seemed unshaken by the Vatican's response. "Yes, well, no more phone calls, no more Christmas cards," he said drily. Has he, perhaps, taken some pleasure in tweaking the Catholic Church? "That doesn't concern me," he said. "The only thing I'm really concerned about is that the women get the apology they deserve."
The film has opened in Britain, to a favorable response. Women who were sent to the Magdalene as young girls have approached Mr. Mullan after screenings. "They all say the same thing," he said. " 'Thanks very much for the film; we really enjoyed it.' And they always add, `The reality was a lot worse.' "
That was the excuse Miramax used. Just facts, folks. Make up your own mind.
Give me a religion, any religion, and in half an hour I'll have enough facts to make those who belong to it appear to be stupid, insane and/or evil. Works for races, sexes, ethnic groups too. You name it, it can be demonized. With irrefutable facts.
The question is why Disney and Miramax seem to only pick Christians.
Yes, so true. Even hatred of Catholics by other Catholics is routine. Like Call to Action, which is more about degrading Catholics who disagree with them, than anything their mission statement says.
Here's a thought: How much feedback will I get if I recommend to the High School Confirmation group I work with to not see, never see 'The Magdalene Sisters'?? What if I try to recommend or take as a group those same teens to see Mel's 'Passion'? I can just hear it now... The complaints, "It's so violent", "Anti-semitic", and more.
Evidently the studio is Miramax.
The media likes to exploit the downside or perversion of some elements of Christianity because (1) it sells, and (2) they do tend to be anti-Christian in our time.
Nevertheless, the right hand needs to be aware of what the left hand has been doing.
To be fair, I think some protestants might have been as mean-spirited, vindictive and exploitive as those nuns at times.
True, although some of the facts may have been embellished.
How about "girl interupted".
of course, nowadays we allow delinquent girls to screw the entire football team, have five abortions, take drugs, and live free away from mom on welfare...we have a million street kids who ran away from home who turn to prostitution. We're soooo much more compassionate about teens....
excuse me, but I wonder how many of these stories are exaggerated? or isolated incidents that are made to seem as if they were "normal"...
After all, these institutions were not "for life" but temporary asylums for girls in trouble. If these institutions are presented as a compassionate alternative, then maybe we'd re open some as an alternative to abortion...whoops can't have that...nor can we show their children who grew up happily in loving adopted families...
I laughed out loud when I read Frank Rich's fatuous column that detailed how the biggest objection to The Passion is that Caiaphas (the Jewish high priest, and the Pharisees' front man in bringing Christ to Pontius Pilate) intimidated Pilate into executing Jesus, and that such a suggestion is "anti-Semitic."
It's not "anti-Semitic," it's the actual Biblical account! Read John 19:4-16, particularly verse 12.
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