The Miracle Club
Short description
The Miracle Club is set in the working-class Dublin suburb of Ballyfermot in the 1960s, where a group of women share a longstanding dream: to win a parish trip to Lourdes, the French town known as a place of pilgrimage and healing. When a local raffle awards the coveted places, Lily, Eileen and Dolly finally get the chance to travel beyond the narrow world they have always known. Their journey gains a more complicated dimension with the arrival of Chrissie, who has been living abroad and whose return stirs up old tensions among the friends. In Lourdes, each woman must reckon with her own past and with what friendship and forgiveness can and cannot repair.
The film was directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, whose earlier features include Ordinary Decent Criminal and Into the Storm, and was written by Joshua Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne. Maggie Smith plays Lily Fox, Laura Linney plays Chrissie Ahearn, Kathy Bates plays Eileen Dunne and Agnes O'Casey plays Dolly Hennessy, with Stephen Rea and Mark O'Halloran among the supporting cast.
Released in July 2023, the film takes a modest, character-driven approach to its story of faith and reconciliation. Its worldwide box office of around 7 million dollars reflects a small-scale release rather than a broad commercial phenomenon, and the ratings are similarly middling: 6.4 out of 10 on IMDb from roughly 8,700 votes and 6.3 out of 10 on TMDB from about 152 votes. A critics' score of 5.7 out of 10 from 116 reviews places professional assessment close to, and slightly below, audience opinion.
What's left behind the scenes
- Producers Joshua D. Maurer and Alexandr Whitlin carried the idea for this project for over 18 years. Initially, Maurer sold it to HBO in 2005, at which time it was assumed that screenwriter Jimmy Smallhorn would also direct, and the cast would include Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates, Joan Allen, Claire Danes and Brenda Blethyn, but the project gradually stalled. Maurer and Whitlin did not lose hope and continued to look for sponsors for the project year after year. After numerous rejections, they finally managed to interest Lionsgate UK and Embankment in the project, and they agreed to finance the adaptation of the script, which Maurer rewrote in collaboration with Timothy Prager. With this updated script, Maurer and Whitlin secured the agreement of Smith, Bates and Laura Linney to film, and then brought on Tadeusz O’Sullivan as director and Chris Curling as producer. Work on the film was interrupted three times due to Covid restrictions.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
