The Miracle Club

Amanda Lauer reviews a new movie featuring four women who went to Lourdes in search of miracles.

Numerous films and documentaries have been produced through the years that focus on the topic of Lourdes, where our Blessed Mother appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858, but generally they’re of a serious nature. The most recent movie on this topic, The Miracle Club, which is being released by Sony Pictures Classics on July 14, 2023, is a heartwarming story with a touch of laugh-out-loud humor.

The Miracle Club, directed by lifelong Catholic and Ireland native Thaddeus O’Sullivan, stars Academy Award winners Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates, Academy Award nominee Laura Linney, and Agnes O’Casey.

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Set in the blue-collar community of Ballygar, Dublin, in 1967, the story centers on a group of three generations of Catholic friends, Lily (Maggie Smith), Eileen (Kathy Bates), and Dolly (Agnes O’Casey), who dream of winning a pilgrimage to Lourdes: the first prize for a talent contest at their parish.

Through a series of events, their dream comes true. A fourth member of their group had planned to be part of the pilgrimage but passed away before the trip. When her daughter Chrissie (Laura Linney), a younger cousin of Eileen’s whom she’d looked after when the girl’s father had died, comes home from America for the first time in 40 years to attend the funeral, she finds herself on the trip to France as well.

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Lourdes, known for miracles, draws millions of visitors each year. Each woman in their group has a different set of expectations for the trip, either looking for health or healing for themselves or a loved one, or having no thought of experiencing a miracle at all.

The four leading ladies did an incredible job of portraying characters who were suffering from decades of guilt and anger. The trip to Lourdes opens old wounds, encourages the women to confess their troubled past, and, in the end, brings forgiveness and healing to each of them in ways they never could have imagined.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan turned out to be the ideal director for The Miracle Club, having lived in working-class Dublin in the 1960s. “I know the world pretty well,” he noted. “The subject matter was of great interest to me in regards to the lives of the women but also Lourdes as well. It is seriously important in Irish Catholic culture. Growing up we, were keenly aware of what Lourdes meant to people, especially those who had made the pilgrimage. The miracles were accepted as part of that. The voice of those women I knew well—the language and the situations.”

The script, written by Jimmy Smallhorne, came into O’Sullivan’s hands 20 years ago. Originally a comedy, through the years it evolved to deepen the backstory and relationship between the four main characters. O’Sullivan said they were extremely fortunate to cast the actors they did for the movie, but it was a bit intimidating working with such fabled talent.

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“I was terrified to begin with," he recalled. "After two or three days I relaxed and got on with the job. I’ve worked in the film business for a very long time and you realize these actors are professionals and want to do a good job and they appreciate very much the contributions of (the crew) around them. They thought very and hard and deep about the characters. We had good conversations. It was a very successful shoot once we got going.”

There is something special about Lourdes itself, O’Sullivan said. “Not everybody expects miracles when you go to Lourdes. But the thing about visiting Lourdes, most people I’ve talked to, is the spirit of the place, the ‘Lourdes affect.’ They are inspired by being in the presence of the people who have such spirituality. It’s a symbol of hope if you ever wanted it.”

O’Sullivan described his ideal audience: “An audience who could believe in what we were talking about—the ability to face the past and forgive each other.” This lines up ideally with the message of The Miracle Club: in his words, “This is about humans’ ability to change when they need to.”

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