All Hail Dame Judi (Philomena Notsomuch)

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Don't you just love Judi Dench's face? Judi Dench's face is an international treasure. Those giant sharp eyes of hers seem designed for cutting you to the quick, but she's a master at freezing it into a sort of dullard's stupefaction too - mostly that's just her being an astonishing actor, able to convey the entire intelligence quotient from zip to zenith with a slight turn of cheek, but it's all there in her features too, a baby doll's head aged into wisdom.  

Philomena's at it's best when it's allowing itself to just stare at that head of hers, and let Judi work her magic with it - my favorite thing about it was its playfulness with the character Philomena's dimbulb-ness. I don't mean the broad "bi-curious" titters really, but rather the film and Dench's openness to the reality that this woman might've spent her years out back in the tool-shed dulling all her tools down - and like that implies, it's an active choice; we see that Philomena's not actually a moron and quite keyed into the world when she needs to be. But for a bunch of reasons - pain, resignation, and simple simplicity - she's decided it's better that way. 

When the film angles for an exploration of such "ignorance is bliss" tactics it's interesting - her head-butting with Steve Coogan's more bitter bastard instincts, over religion and personal privacy and ingratiating wait-staff, are good stuff. Coogan doesn't have much of a character to play, he's really just there to usher us unto Philomena and give her something to bat up against when the film-makers think the old people in the audience might be zoning out, but those moments work.

Unfortunately there's a mush pile of pretty cheap sentiment that the good stuff's plopped down in, and a fairly unrelenting one at that. I can't say I didn't cry - you cut to Judi Dench doing her thing, and she'll make me cry if that's what she's aiming to do. I wish the movie had just trusted her in that a little bit more, is all - speramus in Judi, In Judi We Trust. I don't need you to underline what's going on with Judi Dench's face with a thousand cut-aways to flashbacks and video-footage of her son and all those manipulative bells and whistles. If it played it straight and didn't push itself so hard, it would be a far better movie. As is there's a crowd-pleaser slash tearjerker kinda putting a pillow over the face of what could've been a fine little character study. I suppose that fine little character study's not the movie they were aiming for - at really no point did they let on that it was, as their played for laughs lines about Judi Dench's clitoris suggest. But it's the movie I made up in my head as all that jazz went along, where I took Judi by the hand and we chatted, that was lovely.

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