The Miracle Club

Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, The Miracle Club follows a group of 1960s friends, including Kathy Bates’ Eileen and Maggie Smith’s Lily, as they travel to Lourdes hoping for a miracle that’ll cure their respective ailments. It’s an appealing premise that’s employed to hopelessly bland and forgettable effect by O’Sullivan, as the filmmaker, armed with a script by Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager, and Joshua D. Maurer, delivers a slow-moving, mostly uninvolving drama that contains little in the way of attention-grabbing elements – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded by a barely-there, gossamer-like narrative and John Conroy’s flat, TV-movie-ish visuals. And while O’Sullivan does manage to elicit strong performances from his various actors, The Miracle Club‘s pervasively banal vibe prevents the viewer working up the slightest bit of interest in or enthusiasm for the protagonists’ underwhelming exploits – which ensures that the feel-good conclusion is hardly able to pack the emotional punch O’Sullivan has obviously intended. The end result is a misfire that rarely, if ever, exploits the compelling nature of its setup, which is a shame, certainly, given that the cast, which also includes Laura Linney and Stephen Rea, admittedly does give it their all.

** out of ****