The Miracle Club

Downton Abbey spent so many years preparing audiences for the Dowager Countess’ death, it’s a welcome relief to be reminded that Dame Maggie Smith is still with us, even in material inferior to her tetchy talents. Alongside Kathy Bates and Laura Linney, Smith is one of three grande dames of acting headlining The Miracle Club. Disappointingly, director Thaddeus O’Sullivan doesn’t put any of them to good enough use in this featherweight Irish dramedy set in 1967.

At film’s beginning, three neighbors in a terrace house community are readying for a talent show hosted by the local parish. Performing as a girl group dubbed the Miracles, they’re keen to win first prize – a trip to Lourdes, a place of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees where believers flock in hopes of a miracle. They each have different motivations for wanting to make the journey: They are Lily (Smith), pushing 90 but still mourning the drowning death of her son 40 years prior; Eileen (Bates), at wit’s end with her ne’er-do-well husband (Rea), overfull house of mouths to feed, and a worrying not-yet-diagnosed lump on her breast; and Dolly (O’Casey), whose young son has blown past the development stage where he would be expected to start speaking. There used to be a fourth in the group, but her offscreen death marks the film’s other inciting incident: the arrival of the deceased’s daughter, Chrissie (Linney), who was banished 40 years ago for an undisclosed sin. In town for the funeral, Chrissie comes smartly dressed, all American chic, and bearing a massive chip on her shoulder. When circumstances throw Chrissie together with the Miracles, old grievances are aired.

The script – by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager, and Joshua D. Maurer, and based on a short story by Smallhorne – overestimates the inherent suspense in what sent Chrissie packing so long ago. There are other small if irritating puzzlements – an abrupt transition suggesting a scene, or perhaps a whole subplot, cut; the 16-year age gap between Linney and Bates, whose characters are meant to be cousins, thick as thieves as young women. More aggravating is the way the filmmakers rush over opportunities for genuine drama (a terrible betrayal revealed) to get to the soothing-over place right away (forgiveness offered in the blink of an eye). A short, frank discussion about abortion and a go-for-broke monologue in which Bates uncorks Maureen’s bilious true nature offer glints of the boundary-pushing instincts that launched O’Sullivan’s feature career with 1991’s polyamory period piece December Bride. But those are passing bursts of complexity in a film otherwise determined to be placid, unprovocative, and too cutesy by half.