At two different points in the Irish WWII drama “The Secret Scripture,” the movie’s heroine, Rose (played by Rooney Mara), walks down a windswept beach and stops to admire a fighter plane flown by her true love, Michael (Jack Reynor). It’s easy to understand why director Jim Sheridan includes the shot twice. It’s a beautiful image, this Irish-born flyer “dancing in the sky,” as Rose puts it. And it sets the scene: an Ireland trying to isolate itself from England and the war, having its placidity shattered by the romance between a suspiciously independent woman and a traitor to his homeland. It’s also a tableau that describes what most of “The Secret Scripture” is like: a woman standing still while other people do astonishing things on her behalf.
That’s not meant to be a compliment. “The Secret Scripture” is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it. Adapted from a Sebastian Barry novel (by Sheridan and co-screenwriter Johnny Ferguson), the movie is about the cruel injustices of a more conservative, restrictive era, and about how the regressiveness of this time and place crushed one woman’s individuality. But the villains are so pervasive and so cartoonishly broad that the story ends up feeling more like a fairy tale—or a metaphor — than like a slice of real history.
What makes this especially disappointing is that “The Secret Scripture” gets off to a promising start, with a framing device that sees psychologist William Gene (Eric Bana) interviewing the elderly Rose (Vanessa Redgrave) at the asylum where she’s been confined for 50 years. The institution’s closing down, but Rose doesn’t want to leave, because she’s afraid she’ll lose the Bible where she’s scrawled the story of her life. She’s also certain that someday she’ll be rescued by her long-lost son — the one she’s been accused of murdering as a newborn. We’re promised a tricky mystery, the solution to which is buried deep in the memories and scribblings of a woman whose brain has endured a battery of shock-treatments.
But it takes way too long for the mystery to unfold. Sheridan and Ferguson compress a novel’s worth of cultural detail into about an hour of screen-time, turning Rose’s life in Ireland during the war into a series of under-explained, over-dramatized miseries. Stuck in a town controlled by a judgmental, unforgiving priest, Father Gaunt (Theo James), Rose finds that she can’t express any sympathy for England, can’t swim anywhere she likes, and can’t look any man straight in the eye — that is, except for Father Gaunt himself, who strongly hints that if she had an affair with him all her troubles would be over. Defying authority, Rose finds herself the subject of gossip and the cause of violent fights among the local men, especially once she starts sneaking off with the community’s other outcast, Michael.
All of this is setting up the film’s big moment of drama, when the patriarchy conspires to lock Rose up as a sex-crazed madwoman. From there, “The Secret Scripture” somehow gets even more overwrought, adding heartless sanitarium nurses to the full complement of mean-spirited Catholics. During the scenes in the present-day, Redgrave’s performance is subtle enough to hint that maybe the melodramatic flashbacks are as ridiculously intense as they are because they’re the ravings of a brain-damaged elderly person. But the plot never really moves in that direction; instead, most of the scenes with the older Rose and Dr. Gene ploddingly move toward a big revelation that most of the audience will see coming.
“The Secret Scripture” has a handsome look, and Sheridan’s history directing films like “In the Name of the Father” and “The Boxer” certainly suggests that he’s the right man for a story about the longstanding tensions between Ireland and England — and the even rougher relationship between hard-line Catholics and free-thinking strays. But ultimately, this is more the rough outline to a movie than a satisfying picture in and of itself. The biggest absence is at the movie’s center, with Rose, who gets pushed around by various men and rarely gets to push back. Granted, this is largely the point of “The Secret Scripture,” that women had no power in Ireland a century ago. But it’s a point that could’ve been made better with an actual multifaceted, passionate, actively engaged person as its heroine, rather than an inert martyr. [C-]
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