Cheap The Magdalene Sisters (DVD) (Anne-Marie Duff, Dorothy Duffy) (Peter Mullan) Price

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Customer Reviews of The Magdalene Sisters

Abuse, Oppression, and Shame hold us prisoner for 2 hours
It's 1960's Ireland and three teenaged girls present us with their brief "lapses" of faith in God. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is attending a family wedding where a drunken cousin gets her alone and rapes her. Word of the crime gets to her father and the local priest, but the rapist isn't punished. Instead, Margaret is shipped off in shame to the care of the Magdalene sisters. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is pregnant out of wedlock and, when the baby is born, it is taken away and the young girl is forcibly shipped to the convent. For Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), the only crime she committed was to flirt, from a distance, with teenaged boys at school. The three arrive together at the place that could well be their "home" for the rest of their miserable lives. <
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>"The Magdalene Sister" is an earnest indictment against a Church system that indentured thousands of women and subjected them to long, hard days of scrubbing laundry for the local businesses, earning money for the sisters but getting none of it in return for their back breaking labors. <
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>The day-to-day toil the girls must withstand - including humiliating strip downs, physical abuse and psychological torture - is depicted with sometime nauseating believability. In this time when the Catholic Church is under scrutiny at all levels "The Magdalene Sisters" feels timely, though it is a subject the was close to Mullan's heart for years before coming to the screen. <
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>Writer/director Peter Mullan crafts a film that plays its period time frame well, and presents the convent itself as an almost Medieval prison where the daughters of the working cast are sent for real or imagined crimes against the Lord. He is fortunate to have a talented cast of both newcomers and veterans that lend realness to the proceeds. <
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>Geraldine McEwan, as the convent's Mother Superior, is chilling with her kindly outward demeanor that masks the cold heart of a cruel martinet who cares more about the money her wards earn than she ever would for any of the girls and women under her dubious care. This is the best supporting actress performance for 2003 - Great films need great villians and she delivers the goods. <
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>The trio of young women at the film's focus give strong performances as innocents torn from their families because of arcane thinking that seem dated for the 19th Century, never mind for the later half of the 20th. Noone, in particular, has good presence and comes across with just the right sassy note as she professes her innocence to Sister Bridget. "I'm a good girl, sister," she insists to her jailer. <
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>This film is a heartfelt honesty of art work, the fine performances and deft crafting make this a must for the socially conscious. This film is disturbing and very hard to watch at times...and yes, if you are faint at heart you may want to stay away from it. But, if you can brave the cruelty, abuse, and oppression you will find that there is hope in it and it does set the main characters free.

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an ending that pays off
Films are all about endings. This point is universal and applies to all content. Polanski's The Pianist may be a true story of survival in WWII, but there is no climax to the drama relayed on screen. It doesn't matter if it is esacapist pap like Armageddon or the hard-hitting social criticism of this work, you need that cathartic moment at the end to satisfy your emotional commitment to the film. The Magadalene Sisters rewards you through a six-word line of dialogue repeated by one of the main characters (beware: other reveiwers give this ending away!). It is a line that will go down in film history. When you hear it for the first time, it hits you in the chest like a runaway truck. <
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>Peter Mullan has made intriguing, admirable choices as an actor - My Name is Joe, Young Adam, Club Shichibu. His choices as a director are proving equally astute. His willingness to tackle such a controversial topic so early in his directorial career reveals maturity and courage. His deft handling of the content is testimony to his craftsmanship. This is a film that whose stock will rise as the years pass. I can't wait to see Mullan's next choice.

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Separating Church and State
This movie illustrates the need to separate Church and State. Jesus would have never treated sinners as harshly as Irish society treated these poor young women. There was simply no where that they could turn to for help, even their families turned against them. I don't think the movie was necessarily anti-catholic. While I am prolife, I fear that some protestant groups in the U.S. would relish casting stones at young women sinners if given the power to do so. The alliance between Church and State in Ireland was certainly unholy. Thank God for the U.S. Constitution!!