The Wonder

Year 15, Day 77 - 3/18/23 - Movie #4,378

BEFORE: Ciaran Hinds carries over from "Belfast", and this creates an Irish two-fer for St. Patrick's Day weekend. I had corned beef & cabbage on Friday for lunch but since I had an early morning shift, I wasn't able to drink any beer on Friday night.  OK, so tonight then after 14 hours at the theater, I'll just have to drink twice as much...

This is another film that played at the theater where I work, it was part of the Tuesday night film appreciation class for adults, and I worked the screening but I didn't get to watch the film. It's nice that's it's available on Netflix, it's also set in Ireland and it slips right into my chain.  

It's Day 18 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme - all-day - is "Westerns" - which seems fitting since "Belfast" featured footage from "High Noon" and "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance". Here's today's line-up:

6:00 am "Viva Villa" (1934)

8:00 am "The Westerner" (1940)

10:00 am "Cimarron" (1931)

12:15 pm "Stagecoach" (1939)

2:15 pm "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949)

4:15 pm "Giant" (1956)

8:00 pm "Hud" (1963)

10:00 pm "How the West Was Won" (1962)

1:00 am "The Naked Spur" (1953)

2:45 am "Cat Ballou" (1965)

4:30 am "The Big Sky" (1952)

I keep meaning to watch "Cimarron" because it was a Best Picture winner, but so far I haven't been able to - same goes for "How the West Was Won", it seems like a fine film that I never have time to watch.  So I've only seen "Giant" and "Cat Ballou", that gives me only 2 out of 11 today, and brings me to 91 seen out of 203, so down to 44.8%.  Oh, well.

THE PLOT: The story follows a young Irish girl who stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. An English nurse is brought to her tiny village to observe her. 

AFTER: I just HATE the way this one starts and ends, it opens on a soundstage where the model of a house has been built, with obvious piping around it for cameras to be attached to, it's a tip-off that what we're about to watch is a movie that was (at least partially) filmed on a stage, which calls to mind films like "Dogville", where the staging is an obvious part of the performance, and I just don't approve of this, it takes me out of the fantasy world, or at least acknowledges that the world we're about to see doesn't really exist, a lot of it is just movie magic.  But why do this at all?  Why not just open on an Irish bog and let us believe in the story just a tiny bit more?  Very soon the camera goes into another set, which represents the boat that's taking the lead character from England to Ireland, and from then on everything LOOKS real enough, so my suggestion would just be to cut out the first couple of minutes where the fake set looks like a fake set, and just start the film on the fake set that looks like a real boat, like normal films would do.  Then at the end the film goes back to the set before the credits roll. 

Look, I get it, it's very meta, or maybe Shakespearean - everything is just shadows, the stuff that dreams are made from, and nothing is real except what we are told is real, only it isn't, so we're back to nothing is real.  And the whole film is kind of about what is reality, like could a teen girl really go for months without food, could that be real, or is it just another artifice, like everything that we tend to see on the screen is?  I get it, but I don't have to like it - it's overly "arty" and too self-reflexive at the same time - even as a style, I don't approve of it, because it yanks me out of the fantasy world, it interferes with my suspension of disbelief.  

Nothing is real, and there's nothing to get hung about, unless you're the person sent to either prove or disprove this medical, possibly holy miracle.  The local council calls for the pairing of a nun and a nurse to investigate the girl, together they'll be watching her around the clock to see if she's somehow secretly ingesting food or otherwise pulling some kind of fast one.  Wait, no otherwise, that's really the only possible explanation for how this girl is able to not eat and also not die.  Bear in mind this is set back in the time shortly after the Great Famine in Ireland (which ran from 1845 to 1852, I'm told) which was caused by a potato blight and about 1 million Irish people died from starvation, and another 1 million moved out of the country.  A secondary cause of the famine was the over-reliance of the Irish people on the potato crop - so the lesson to be learned is "Grow and eat a lot of different foods, just in case."

This girl, Anna, became famous for her fasting - and the condition is known as anorexia miribilis, or "holy anorexia", which is slightly different from anorexia nervosa, which is a loss of appetite resulting from the fear of becoming overweight.  The "Holy anorexia" is connected to religious fasting, it's not "I'm afraid to eat" but more like "I don't need to eat, because I believe in God". Which doesn't sound like a logical sentence, not at all.  But the nurse, Elizabeth or "Lib", is not a religious believer, so she looks for other possible reasons to account for the girl not eating, and she notices that the girl's family is responsible for taking care of her during her fasting periods.  Also, Anna claims that she subsists on "manna from heaven", which also is a suspicious statement - I remember that in the Bible the Jews wandering in the desert also survived on manna, and one commonly held belief is that "manna" in that case was a euphemism for bird droppings.  

So Lib separates Anna from her family, and then the girl starts starving for real, and her body begins shutting down.  So this would suggest that Lib had essentially cracked the case, most likely one of the family members was slipping her food somehow.  But the council would not listen to reason, and suggested that the girl continue to be watched, even if this resulted in her death. Yeah, it sure sounds like the council had her best interests at heart, because they all wanted to believe in the miracle so badly.  Yeah, there's more to the story, the reasons for things being the way they are, but no spoilers here. You can watch the film and try to put the clues together yourself, let me know how you did. 

Meanwhile, Lib is still grieving the death of her own child, and takes laudanum (derived from opium) to help her sleep.  Lib pleads with the family to take some action, even if it's to return to whatever devious action they were doing to feed their daughter on the down low, but the family instead can only look forward to their lives once Anna has completed her penance and passed on. What a supportive bunch.  Lib has to devise an ingenious way to convince Anna to keep on living, but also satisfy the family and community that apparently wants her to die, on some level. 

I appreciate the takedown of religion here, but the fact of the matter is that it IS possible for some people to survive without food - technically.  The story behind the development of brewing certain European beers is that monks who were fasting could survive longer without food by drinking strong beers, because beer is essentially bread in liquid form, if you think about it.  Then these monks created the lambic styles of beer, which often had fruit added to them - still a liquid, but getting much closer to nutritious food once citrus fruits got added to the beers - why, they were practically healthy at that point!  So there you go, religiously safe by a whisker, the monks could technically not break their fast if their "food" was in the liquid form of beer.  This sounds more like the reasoning came from a lawyer, not a priest - but if you drink the right beers, I've heard you can survive without (solid) food for a long time.  I'm going to have a few beers myself tonight, after my very long (14 hour) shift at the movie theater, so I'll let you know how that goes. 

Also starring Florence Pugh (last seen in "Black Widow"), Kila Lord Cassidy, Tom Burke (last seen in "Mank"), Niamh Algar, Elaine Cassidy (last seen in "The Others"), Caolan Byrne, Toby Jones (last seen in "Zoo"), Dermot Crowley (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Brian F. O'Byrne (last seen in "No Reservations"), David Wilmot (last seen in "King Arthur" (2004)), Ruth Bradley (last seen in "The Informer"), Josie Walker (also carrying over from "Belfast"), Graeme Coughlan. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 visiting pilgrims