Mr. Smith is correct – if Hollywood likes being”edgy” and “speaking truth to power”, do a film showing Islam and its prophet in an unflattering light. Attacking Catholicism brings no danger to the Harvey Weinstein’s of the world. The fact that the film will likely be a financial bomb is irrelevant to Hollywood, they are more interested in playing to their own prejudices and winning awards from each other then making money.

by Kyle Smith

I’ve never been flogged in the public square, but now I have a rough idea what it’s like.

On Thursday, Harvey Weinstein, the US distributor of the Judi Dench-Steve Coogan film “Philomena,” placed a full-page, color attack ad in The New York Times that screamed my name in blood-red letters.

“The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today ALL PRAISE ‘PHILOMENA’ WITH A 92 % CERTIFIED FRESH SCORE ON Rotten Tomatoes,” read the ad. “BUT THE NEW YORK POST’S KYLE SMITH HAS A DIFFERENT OPINION. ‘ANOTHER HATEFUL ATTACK ON CATHOLICS.’ ”

The ad (now brightening the wall over my desk) went on to quote my Nov. 21 pan of the movie, then printed excerpts of a rebuttal by Philomena Lee, the Irish woman portrayed by Dench in the movie.

“Philomena” is about Lee’s quest, in the company of a former BBC journalist played by Coogan, to learn what happened to her son after she gave him up for adoption at a convent in 1952 Ireland. The movie makes this particular Irish Catholic institution look about as pleasant as Abu Ghraib.

I found the film lazy, contrived, with a dull odd-couple road-trip structure dabbed with insipid humor (Coogan, in a discussion of busty 1950s pinups Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell: “They were very big. They were huge! Their careers”) and smack-you-in-the-nose dialogue like “What they did to you was evil” and Coogan’s crowd-pleasing, film-defining cry, “F – – – ing Catholics!”). I could see no reason for the movie’s existence other than to soar overhead in the guise of the sweet bird of comedy, then drop a surprise load of guano on Catholic institutions (and, in the second half, the US Republican Party).

Film critics tend to give a free pass to obvious, trite, heavy-handed movies that light up the correct political-pleasure circuits in their brains. I’m used to disagreeing with them. That is because I am, as far as I know, the only conservative film critic in the entire United States who writes regularly for a general-interest newspaper or magazine. I see things all the others miss.

Lee’s rebuttal is essentially that the film can’t be anti-Catholic because it’s about her, and she remains a woman of faith. “ ‘Philomena’ is meant to be a testament to good things, not an attack,” she wrote in her open letter. Then she forgave me for “not taking the time to understand my story.”

Well, Philomena, since we’re on a first-name basis, I forgive you, too, for being so dazzled by Judi Dench’s star power that you didn’t notice that in the movie your character, while indeed a defender of your faith, is also made out to be a blithering moron.

While I have no doubt that you, Philomena, have a sharp and lively mind as you prove in your letter, the movie makes you out to be a dimwit and butt of most of its jokes.

The sophisticate in the film, the one who represents the audience of wised-up urban filmgoers who are Harvey Weinstein’s customers, is the atheist journalist Martin Sixsmith, portrayed by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote and produced the film that Stephen Frears directed.

[…….]

Dench/Coogan/Frears’ Philomena thinks “Oxbridge” is an actual university (instead of shorthand for Oxford and Cambridge) and fails to get any of Sixsmith’s jokes (though she bursts into laughter when he tells her, “My mother has advanced osteoarthritis in both knees”). She spends a solid minute-and-a-half of screen time disgorging the plot of a moronic romance novel while Coogan looks desperately bored. As Coogan’s Sixsmith puts it, “I’ve finally seen firsthand what a lifetime’s diet of Reader’s Digest, the Daily Mail and romantic fiction can do to a person’s brain.”

[……]

Let’s look at effect rather than intent. One refreshingly forthright reviewer, James Killough of Pure Film Creative.com, writes, ‘Phenomenal ‘Philomena’ Serves It up to Those ‘F – – – ing Catholics,’ ” adding, “If you don’t agree with Steve Coogan’s exasperated exclamation about Catholicism in reference to its abuse of, well, just about everyone in the history of its existence, then you’re likely a member of the Catholic clergy, or as terrorized by this most dangerous and egregious of Christian sects as Philomena herself.”

My inbox is full of e-mail from fans of the film saying “a) how dare you ding it for being anti-Catholic when b) the Catholic Church is so transparently evil?”

We all know how cruel it was for the mid-century Catholic Church to provide shelter for scorned women written off as dead by their families, help them give birth to their children and place the adoptees in loving homes. Today we’d be much more compassionate: We’d simply abort all those kids. Problem solved!

Today’s Philomenas don’t have to wonder what happened to their babies. They’re out back, in the Dumpster. But better that than growing up to be a Republican.

This film is yet another episode in Hollywood’s long history of grubbing for awards based on claims of historical and sociopolitical importance, then sheepishly claiming dramatic license when things don’t hold up to scrutiny. If key underlying facts are wrong, how well does the conclusion hold up?

The film gives the false impression that Philomena’s son was (as Sixsmith put it in an article he wrote for, yes, The Daily Mail, “Stolen from his mother — and sold to the highest bidder”). It also claims the nuns burned all records to cover up what they’d done.

Dench even says, in an introduction to the book the film is based on, that you, Philomena, were “forced” to give up your child. Dench has already forgotten her line in the film, “No one coerced me. I signed of my own free will.” The audience will forget she said that too, since the rest of “Philomena” creates the strong impression that you, Philomena, were coerced into giving your son up for adoption.

[……..]

If, like ex-BBC man Sixsmith and the filmmakers, you’re going to accuse people of wrongdoing, I’m afraid the burden of proof is on you, and Sixsmith’s book on the matter, which reads like a novel, is hardly convincing. It contains long stretches of seemingly invented dialogue supposedly spoken more than 50 years ago by people now dead and offers no footnotes or source notes.

It starts with a weaselly disclaimer about situations being “reconstructed to the best of my ability,” along with a cheeky confession that “gaps have been filled, characters extrapolated and incidents surmised.” (Who knew the BBC’s journalism department had a “reconstruct to the best of your ability” subdivision?)

It’s also unlikely the movie’s villain, Sister Hildegard McNulty, met with Sixsmith after he started working on the story in 2004, since she died in 1995. It’s therefore even more unlikely that she denounced you, Philomena, as yielding to “carnal” desires at that nonexistent meeting.

Nor am I entirely convinced, Philomena, that the people who (unlike you) actually made the film meant it as something other than an attack. In an interview with The Telegraph, director Frears boasted that during the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival, “the Coogan’s character’s explosive howl of ‘f – – – ing Catholics!’ ” won “a big round of applause.” This prompted an ebullient Frears to ask Coogan, “Can’t we repeat that line?” Coogan wouldn’t — he was afraid of catching hell from his parents, who raised him Catholic.

Like Coogan, I was raised Catholic and became an atheist, but I have too much respect for people of faith to be obnoxious about it.

[……..]

Your forgiving the Church may make you a saint, but it does nothing to lessen the audience’s outrage.

I mostly agreed with Christopher Hitchens’ book “god Is Not Great,” but Hitchens didn’t take cheap shots and he was no coward: He stood tall and loudly denounced the world’s great threat to secular humanism, the one that commands the frightening allegiance of hundreds of millions of true believers: medieval, unreformed Islam, not constantly self-reforming Christianity. Why make a movie about adoption procedures in 1952 Ireland when people are being murdered in the name of religion today, in Europe and America?

As they say in Hollywood, try to raise the stakes. Harvey Weinstein’s resume of anti-Catholic movies includes “The Magdalene Sisters” (2002), “The Butcher Boy” (1998) and “Priest” (1995). If only for the sake of a change of pace, why not be really “transgressive” and “edgy” and “groundbreaking” and all the other things Hollywood people tell themselves they are and poke a sharp stick at Islam? Where’s Harvey’s satirical comedy about Mohammed or the one about a child-molesting imam? Where’s his nine-part HBO series based on “The Satanic Verses”?

Weinstein is working up a phony controversy. If “Philomena” enjoys 92% approval, there is no need to draw attention to the handful of critics who negged it.

Except: “Philomena” played to mostly empty theaters in its debut last weekend. Hey, if people aren’t interested in it as a movie, sell it as a “controversy” tinged with liberal political solidarity: If you don’t buy a ticket you’re on the same side as those evil conservatives who want the movie to flop!

There isn’t any serious disagreement about the content of “Philomena.” Anyone who is honest understands that it lambastes the way Irish Catholicism played out in 1950s Ireland, using falsehoods whenever necessary to underscore the point, and by implication the complicit Catholic Church itself.

Some like “Philomena” for that reason. Some think there should be a little more art than diatribe to a film.

Read the rest – Harvey Weinsetein’s ‘Philomena’ attack ad