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List Price: $19.99 | | Label: Miramax Home Entertainment
Salesrank: 13713
Released: March 23, 2004 |
| Our Price: $9.57 |
| Used Price: $4.00 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A stirring, must-see motion picture critics called one of the best films of the year, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS is the triumphant story of three extraordinary women whose courage to defy a century of injustice would inspire a nation! Abandoned by society and cast out by their families for crimes they did not commit, these women found themselves stripped of their liberty and dignity and condemned to indefinite sentences of manual labor. Within the church-run Magdalene Laundries, these women were forced into unbearable institutional servitude in order to cleanse themselves of the "sins" of which they had been accused. From acclaimed director Peter Mullan, this award-winning powerhouse not only reveals the truth behind one of the great tragedies of our time, but celebrates the bravery that would bring it to an end!
Description of The Magdalene Sisters:
A movie guaranteed to make the blood boil, The Magdalene Sisters gives a lacerating account of life inside a Magdalene Laundry, one of the dismal asylums for "wayward women" run by the Catholic Church in Ireland. Director Peter Mullan, inspired by a TV documentary on the same subject, follows the miserable fates of three young women who are institutionalized in the 1960s for flimsy reasons; their lives are at the mercy of sadistic nuns (Geraldine McEwan is superb as the head of the place). The film sounds tortuous, but its rich sense of outrage and excellent performances--Nora-Jane Noone is a real discovery--make it consistently gripping. The movie won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and went on to become a box-office hit in Ireland, where the Magdalene system was still a fresh memory. It had been abolished only in 1996. --Robert Horton
The Magdalene Sisters Reviews:
A Place of Shame 
2009-09-01 - I watched this film while researching tie-in subjects for the September Greeting page. In a moment of synchronicity, I also found an answer of sorts to something that had puzzled me just recently (well, more or less.) I reviewed TEARS OF STONE; a Chieftains CD that featured a song by Joni Mitchell titled "The Magdalene Laundries." I thought it was one the best crafted songs JM had composed, but was curious about the title & subject matter. While viewing THE MAGDALENE SISTERS I experienced one of those "Ah, so...that's what she was talking about."
Mitchell's song is not in the movie.
Another one of those moments quickly followed when a new character was introduced in the film and I thought, "Hmm...she looks familiar." Of course it was Anne-Marie Duff portraying one of The Magdalene victims. Totally different look, TOTALLY different character on screen, but that same inner-something that makes her an effective & captivating actress.
The film is about the real-life scandal of a Roman Catholic institution for wayward women that is something like a cross between THE EXORCIST and a concentration camp. This plays out in the 1960's. Ireland was very conservative socially (still is in some respects) and women bore the brunt of its restrictions. Some of the other people who reviewed the movie felt that it was unjustly prejudiced against the Roman Catholic Church & presented demonized portraits of the nuns in charge of the girls/women.
I was in parochial school in the US during the same time period. The school was pretty liberal (all things considered), racially diverse, Judaism was presented in a favorable light, etc. The nuns were pretty "normal" and most of them were well liked by the students. Personally, I only had a problem with one Sister--and she was really warped & nasty. She certainly had her highly repressive pincers into me. However, nothing like what it must have been like to have been an Irish girl virtually held in bondage by [...] bureaucrats.
THE MAGDALENE SISTERS is a vivid journey into a dark well of cruelty & the grossest hypocrisy. The women trapped in this pit are forced to find the strength within themselves to literally break out. Some make it, some don't.
It's a brilliant film that is so real, most people won't want to see again.
Hence the 4 stars rather than 5.
Maybe that's just me not wishing to revisit a place of shame...
Tears of Stone
Doesn't wash 
2009-07-27 - The story of girls rejected from their families for giving birth out of wedlock -- or simply for being sensual -- should be horrifying. But "The Magdalene Sisters" manages to take a horrid, shameful period of Irish Catholic history and turn it into something tepid. In the 1940s, Irish girls are arrested and imprisoned in "reformatories" named for penitent prostitute Mary Magdalene. Here, they are overseen by mean nuns who makes them wash clothes all day. The nuns lock them in at night, dress them in plain clothes and make fun of their bodies at bath time. Though I find these practice repulsive, the movie did not convey the sense of horror, shame and betrayal felt by these girls. In the film, they come across more as crybabies than as hapless victims of a fanatical theocracy -- more like "Boo hoo hoo -- I had to wash a priest's underwear." The film had historical value, and might been cathartic to those closer to the story. But as someone who went through old-time Catholic grade school in the 1960s, with plenty of emotional levers to pull, I found that this film left me unmoved.
The Magdalene Sisters, a harsh reality 
2009-07-18 - The repercussions of these events go on in Ireland today. The church has worked in collusion with the government, even today, to avoid making reparations for what is seen in this film. It is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Well acted, powerful, emotionally charged film.
Unsmiling Irish Eyes
2009-06-29 - The Magdalene Sisters is a powerful portrayal of one of the bigger embarrassments of the Catholic Church. This dramatization is based on the quite real process of sending Irish "bad girls" away to serve, basically, as slave labor in labor camps run by nuns. The representative "composites" depicted here are sent to the Magdalene Laundry for a variety of "sins"-having children out of wedlock, being raped by a cousin, being a "loose" woman (without ever having sex). The facilities were named after Mary Magdalene, the sinner/saint who, in the eyes of the clergy, had something in common with the girls shipped into their "care."
I'm not surprised the Vatican newspaper didn't give this film a lot of stars! It is a damning condemnation of Catholic hypocrisy and clerical brutality. The nuns portrayed in this film have little to do with anything truly Christian... there is no sign of forgiveness, caring, love, compassion, or understanding. Instead, the girls are offered hostility, insults, shame, sadism, and physical and psychological violence. Some of these nuns would make your average Nazi concentration camp guard seem relatively kind and gentle. Convents will not be using clips from this film in their recruiting videos.
The movie is riveting, moving, and distressing. It pains my Irish genes to see this dark, shameful phase of Irish history (and it makes me shudder to learn that the last Magdalene Laundry closed less than 15 years ago).
The Magdalene Sisters
2009-06-18 - Although I consider myself to be fairly well educated, had anyone told me that these institutions existed into the 1990's, I doubt that I would have believed it. It reminds of of Orwell's 1984 "thought crimes." The question of "how can things like this happen?" will stay with you long after the last scenes. It was and still is hard to believe that this is based on a true situation. The corruption of innocence is portrayed with such civil and deliberate cruelty that you really do not want to see it but cannot turn your eyes away. I hope that there are no other countries which now allow such brutality to exist.
