THE THIRD MIRACLE (Agnieszka Holland, 1999)

Films of faith are problematic things for some of us, but I am as unbiased in this cinematic realm as in any other; Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1954) is among my favorite films. Polish-born Agnieszka Holland, a self-described lapsed Roman Catholic, is saddled here with a script (in part by the author) based on a plot-tricky novel by Richard Vetere. Her film, however, fascinates. It is rich in the grays of human existence.
     Chicago, 1979. Father Frank Shore (Ed Harris, superb), a weary, doubting and self-doubting priest, is chosen as postulator to investigate a candidate for sainthood. A statue of the Virgin Mary curatively bleeds one month a year in commemoration of the devout woman’s death. Shore’s recommendation is affirmative. A year hence he presents his evidence, which is contested by a “devil’s advocate” appointed by the Vatican. Three years later, his faith restored, he and others await evidence of a “third miracle.”
     Holland, whose wonderful films include Olivier, Olivier (1992) and The Secret Garden (1993), is something of a miracle worker herself. She achieves a pervasive sense of Shore’s entire life, which includes many more valleys than hills, as manifesting God’s mysterious will. Holland accomplishes this without resorting to the least amount of determinism. On the contrary, Shore’s life is as much an open book for us to read as it has been for him to live. What one accepts intellectually while watching an Eric Rohmer film—that such a design exists—one actually feels while watching The Third Miracle.
     Anne Heche brilliantly plays Roxanne, the daughter of Helen O’Regan (Barbara Sukowa), the candidate for sainthood; Roxanne feels that her mother abandoned her for the Church. In the closing coda, although the characters themselves are blind to it, we witness the third miracle.

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LOST AND DELIRIOUS (Léa Pool, 2001)

I’m such a fan of Swiss-born, Québécoise filmmaker Léa Pool’s autobiographical Set Me Free (Emporte-moi, 1999) that I don’t know what to make of her Lost and Delirious. A boarding-school melodrama of a freshman girl’s coming-of-age and a senior’s disintegration after her first love affair goes south, the film vastly alters plot details of Susan Swan’s autobiographical novel The Wives of Bath, in addition to updating it from the early sixties to the present. Her father and girlfriend/stepmother have deposited quiet Mouse there, orphaning her further after her mother’s death; her roommates, it turns out, are lovers. Mouse’s gradual acceptance of their lesbianism is part of her emotional growth (some of which is recorded in voiceover), but Paulie’s breakdown after Tori dumps her for a boy is so garishly painted that Mouse’s interior drama, and along with it her status as protagonist, gets lost in the emotional chaos. It also doesn’t help that Mischa Barton, who plays Mouse, is an incompetent actress.
     Angelina Jolie-lookalike Piper Perabo takes over with her hysterical stridency—even before the breakup with Tori—as Paulie. The film’s schematic quality, culminating in a suicidal flight of freedom off a roof, revolves around her pushy, one-dimensional characterization. Perabo is nowhere near as convincing as Liza Minnelli as Pookie in The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula, 1969).
     Paulie develops a relationship with an injured hawk out in the woods, whose recovery becomes a magnet for the care that has nowhere else to go after Tori’s rejection. It is the recovered bird’s flight that we see at the end—a poetical touch, not a poetic one. Symbols and metaphors should enrich a work of art, not reduce it.
     Herself a lesbian, Pool pleads her case for tolerance. Alas, her film does little else.

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