The acclaimed film Philomena came out last year and was a critical darling. Dame Judi Dench stars in the title role of an Irish woman forced to give up her toddler during a dark chapter of Ireland’s history. Steve Coogan is the journalist who embarks on a quest to help her find her son.
I haven’t seen the movie but I just finished reading the book. And despite its title, it has about as much to do with Philomena as How I Met Your Mother had to do with the mother.
In the 1950s the Catholic church was in charge of unwed mothers and they made a habit (pun intended) of essentially selling children to Americans who made generous donations to the church. There was a power struggle between the Irish government and the church and for a long while, the church won. Getting pregnant outside of marriage was a sin, you see, and only the church was equipped to deal with these women blah blah blah. A young Mom traded 3 years of labour at an orphanage in exchange for shelter. Then at about the three year mark, the child would be ripped from the mother and she would be sent out to make her own way in a world that saw her as damaged goods. In Philomena’s case, and in most cases, the family shunned the sinner and wanted nothing to do with the product of her sin.
The book and the movie are very different. In both, a Mom and son are trying to find each other but the point of view is switched between mediums. In the movie, the journalist joins Philomena on her quest. The book is more about her son, Anthony, whose name is changed to Michael, and his attempts to discover whether he was abandoned by a heartless woman or reluctantly given up. He became a powerful figure in the Republican party and an insider at the White House during the Reagan era. He wrestled with his conscious as a highly placed member of a political party that was on the record as being anti-gay, while he was a closeted gay man. And then came AIDS. The book chronicles, in painful detail, the Reagan adminstration’s refusal to acknowledge the severity of the epidemic or to do anything about it for a long time, even as some of its insiders suffered and died.
I cried through the last chapter of Philomena. It’s heartbreaking. If you’ve seen the movie, the reasons for the heartbreak are the same and I won’t reveal them here. But know that the book and film are not similiar. While it’s a wonderful read, the book is more about capturing the evils of an era and the inner turmoil of a man who has put himself on a ladder to success that causes him to ignore his ethics.