Film: 'The Secret Scripture'

Firstly, for the many who are interested and concerned, I'm very pleased to report that Blackso is doing fine. Since yesterday morning when he had his first tablet he's had no further nasty 'turns', is eating well and walking around, though with the wobbly gait he's had for some years now which I put down to his advanced years. So, it's looking as good as it could be hoped. Long may it last. Thanks yet again for everyone's enquiries and wishes.

Further update, 12 hours later: Sorry to report he's had another bad spell, same as before. :-(

Jim Sheridan is one of the few directors whose films I'll go out of my way to see. They are all significant, and so is this one, though pity about..........well, I'll come to that. 

Taking place in Co. Sligo, Eire, it features a young woman, played by Rooney Mara, in the early 1940s, and by Vanessa Redgrave as the now aged inmate of a mental institution fifty years later.
(This is Redgrave's most substantial role for many years. Although the part doesn't demand a huge range of acting abilities, she does what she has to do as well as you'd expect at a standard for which she's rightly renowned).
There are frequent shifts between the life of the younger woman, and the older who is visited by a doctor (Eric Bana) who tries to find out more about the past of the old woman who keeps muttering that she did NOT kill her baby, along with other cryptic meanderings. Is she hallucinating or is there some truth behind her ramblings? He's also puzzled by an old Bible she owns in which she's written her disjointed thoughts (true memories?) mostly along the top of the pages, but also sometimes within the texts. There are also some pages she's defaced by cutting. 

The young character is a single woman without a family, popular with her looks, and especially takes the fancy of the young parish priest, but any interest in that direction, apart from being 'wrong' she doesn't reciprocate. Things move forward when one of the young shop-owners in the village has enlisted as a British air fighter, a betrayal of the country's war-neutral status. His plane one day flies over and he has to bail out, landing injured and hanging by parachute from the branches of the very tree closest to the young woman's house. (Oh dear!) She helps him down, takes him to her house and hides him from the hostile locals. Their relationship develops and they eventually marry in secret, but he has to flee soon after. The jealous priest finds out and is instrumental, as an act of spite, to get her confined to a harsh mental institution supervised by severe nuns (force feeding, electric shock 'therapy' etc) on the absurd grounds of' 'nymphomania'.  And in this place she is confined for half a century.  

On the whole, it's a good, absorbing story, never boring for one minute - but it's capped by such a cheesy ending as to defy belief. Because I'd heard about there being such, I guessed what it would be before a certain disclosure which comes very late, while all the time thinking "Please don't let it be that!" But it was. Such a shame. 

The film is based on a novel by a Sebastian Barry but director Jim Sheridan shares the writer credits. What happened? Did he really have to follow the novel which, one assumes, had this ending, or couldn't he be bothered to change it for the film? But there it is, in my view marring what would otherwise have been a superior work.

In other respects, the filming of the Irish landscape is magnificently impressive. The script is good, as is the acting throughout. I must say, though, that I could have done with hearing a little less of the opening bars of the 'Moonlight Sonata'.

I'm going to have to shave half a point from my final rating because of the ending (others might cull it by more) but it's still stands up as a darn good film..........................6.5.