Do you believe in miracles?
Would you recognize a miracle if you experienced one?
In The Miracle Club, four women from three generations, played by Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Laura Linney, and Agnes O’Casey, travel from 1967 Dublin, Ireland to Lourdes, France, in search of miracles.
The women share a complicated history which viewers discover as the movie unfolds.
All of this occurs within the context of Catholicism and Irish family structures that resist women having full agency over their lives. All of the women have suffered losses and are in need of healing but will the waters of Lourdes provide them with the miracles they seek?
People tend to think of miracles as sudden events, where individuals are immediately and fully restored to health. Even at Lourdes, the film points out, those kinds of miracles are rare.
But healing is possible when women, though burdened with their own struggles, support and strengthen each other.
I believe that these are miracles, too.
Joanne Corey 