A queen and a pauper with lots in common Soon, accompanied by Sixsmith, Philomena returns to the convent, where he tries to interrogate the nuns about Anthony's fate, and they try to fob them off. Eventually, the search leads to America. Anthony, under his adoptive name of Michael Hess, was, they discover, a White House counsel to President Reagan. I don't want to spoil the suspense by relating why Michael is no longer there. Suffice it to say that each twist is very sad. In other hands, the film could easily be relentless. But Philomena has the charm and strength of Judi Dench's performance, and the side-comedy of Sixsmith's predicament. The depiction of the journalistic world is almost as an unfavourable as that of the convent. The story is one of loss and disappointment. Yet it does not feel like that. This is because Philomena, through all her trials, has retained the core of the faith, almost despite the nuns who profess it. She does not judge; she does forgive; and she acts as if she believes that - in the famous words of Deuteronomy - "underneath are the everlasting arms." She is a sort of fallen Mater Dolorosa. Is this sentimental and, as is so often the case with a "true story," unbelievable? Occasionally, I thought so. There are a few Hollywood-ish moments when the smiling-through-tears stuff becomes a bit much. Possibly Stephen Frears himself toys with this question. Philomena is a woman who loves Mills and Boon-type romances. Are we supposed to find this endearing, or escapist? In the final shot, as she leaves the convent in Martin's car, she is chattering away to him about the plot of one of these bodice-rippers. The unworthy thought even crossed my mind that this ambiguity suits the film's commercial positioning: it is not so anti-Catholic that it will run into trouble with American distributors, and yet it carefully keeps its heart in what most East-Coast liberals would consider to be the right place. But in the end, its consistency can be defended. The "human interest" story lies in Philomena. She is very interesting, and very human. The film provokes a few thoughts about Ireland. Philomena makes the forgiving point that the nuns were living by the rules of the time. Why did those rules exist? Ireland, especially rural Ireland, was extremely poor. Most poor rural societies have strict rules about marriage and child-bearing, because they have to. If motherhood can entail starvation, single motherhood is not the lifestyle choice that it is for many today. It is a disaster, for child and parent alike. In such societies, religion is usually powerful. Its power does good, because it brings great truths to all classes of society, and cares for the poor and the sick. It also does harm, because it corrupts religious leaders, leading them to oppress their flocks. In 20th-century Ireland, the terrible poverty was exacerbated by the politics of the newly independent state. The Celtic mists of Irish nationalism cut the people off from economic freedom, leaving them with little to export but themselves (young Anthony was, in effect, bought by an American Catholic couple wanting a child). The excitement of throwing off the yoke of Protestant England led the Irish Republic to entwine the Catholic Church with political power in a way that terribly damaged both. Out of all this came the sorrows that Philomena depicts. Yet it is complacent to condemn the inhumanity of former times and look so little at our own. We think it disgraceful that Irish nuns took babies from the arms of their mothers, but we do not seem to mind that, every year, abortionists in our own country take 200,000 from their wombs. There will be some tough films made, in 50 or 60 years" time, about the way we live now.