The Wonder: Faith Without Food in 19th Century Post-Famine Ireland
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Florence Pugh, the young British star who declined to promote her central role in Olivia Wilde’s controversy-plagued Don’t Worry, Darling, is back in the spotlight again with The Wonder.
Once again, she brings a determined energy to her performance that almost compensates for the often unpersuasive, sometimes stilted, film built around her.
Coming to Netflix on Nov. 16 after a brief awards-qualifying run, The Wonder is a prestige drama, from Chilean director, Sebastián Lelio (Gloria, A Fantastic Woman). It’s adapted by Irish-Canadian writer, Emma Donoghue (Room) from her own novel, in collaboration with Alice Birch, who wrote Pugh’s breakthrough film, Lady Macbeth.
Lib (Florence Pugh), plays a nurse investigating a “miracle” fast in post-famine Ireland
Just to make sure we don’t mistake this for a naïve historical potboiler, we’re subjected to a Brechtian framing device, set in a contemporary movie studio. As the film opens, a camera tracks through a contemporary warehouse and movie set while a spooky synth chorus plays on the soundtrack:
“Hello,” says a woman’s voice. “This is the beginning. The beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories so we invite you to believe in this one.”
Believing the story, as opposed to believing in it, is relatively easy. The subject of The Wonder is a well-chronicled Victorian-era phenomenon of “fasting girls” (the title of a 1988 book on the history of anorexia by Joan Jacobs Brumberg). These were typically pre-adolescent girls, in various countries, who claimed to go without eating for prolonged periods of time, a miracle ascribed to special magical or religious powers.
Donohue’s novel and screenplay are indebted to the case of Sarah Jacobs, a Welsh girl who died in 1869 while under the watch of a team of nurses, who were sent to test the validity of her religious parents’ claims that she hadn’t eaten in months. The parents were subsequently charged with manslaughter.
The Wonder is set in 1862, a decade after the famine and mass migration that devastated Ireland. Pugh plays a young widowed English nurse, Lib (as in liberated?) Wright, who has trained with Florence Nightingale in Crimea.
She accepts a commission to rural Ireland to monitor a case of an 11-year-old miracle girl, who supposedly hasn’t eaten in four months and has become a cause celebre, the national trauma of starvation now paradoxically seen as evidence of special blessing.
Lib appears before a committee of foreboding town elders, seated in black suits like judges. They include Toby Jones as a credulous doctor, with Ciarán Hinds as the subtle village priest. Though not directly profiting from the miracle child phenomenon (donations go to the poor box), the men have a vested interest in promoting this proof of Catholic faith. In response to a skeptical news article in the national press, they bring in the English nurse and a nun (Josie Walker) as monitors.
Lib, a modern woman of science, will have none of their religious nonsense. She proceeds to examine and interview the child and ask tough questions of the girl’s mother.
Alone at night, she reveals her vulnerability as she takes out a pair of baby boots, and her bottle of laudanum, signs of her painful history and inner struggle..
Skulking around the village is another skeptical sort, a burly Irish reporter from a London newspaper, Will (Tom Burke). But despite his initial rudeness (when he sees Lib chowing down to lunch, he asks if she’s eating for two), has his own tragic story. While he’d been off to England to be a journalist, the family he left behind starved to death. With their shared recognition of grief, the two tumble into each other’s arms (or rather, hold each other up, since they have sex standing up).
Subverting the bodice-ripper cliches, this hasty coupling is not the spark of a great passion, just a moment of mutual consolation and formation of an alliance. As a woman ahead of her time, Lib eats when she wants to and has sex when she wants to. (Still, for a nurse who trained under Florence Nightingale, the “hygiene queen,” you’d think Lib would be a bit more cautious.)
Like Room, The Wonder is ultimately a story of a trapped child, and the best and most tender scenes find Lib and Anna together, sharing their different world views.
The nurse gently listens to the girl and shares some of her past. Anna believes refusal of food is based on a belief that she can save her dead brother from the fires of Hell.
When the girl seems improbably healthy, Lib determines that someone is secretly slipping her food. The nurse imposes a rule that no one can have physical contact with the child, including her mother. The result is Anna’s rapid physical decline, heading toward imminent death.
Lib wants to end the monitoring; the committee, still convinced this is God’s will, refuses.
As with many period stories, The Wonder suggests how much better people in the past would be if they could only think and act the way we do today, and Lib seems so confident and savvy that the forces against her seem weak by comparison. The explanation for Anna’s religious mania, revealed as a case of trauma rather than the lure of sainthood, feels anticlimactic. The ending, on the other hand, is like something from an adventure tale, relying on some improbable improvisation that undermines the idea we’re tied to our histories.
Visually, The Wonder, is a tony affair, from numerous outdoor scenes of the windswept peat fields, and painterly candle-lit interiors, shot by Ari Wegner, of The Power of the Dog fame. The poverty is under-stated with a few details — a few chickens on the kitchen floor and a group of urchins staring through a banister.
Less successful is Matthew Herbert’s jangly, percussive electronic score, which seems determined to prevent us from succumbing to any kind of period movie sentimental complacency.
The Wonder. Directed by Sebastián Lelio. Stars Florence Pugh, Tom Burke and Kila Lord Cassidy, Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds. The Wonder is available on Netflix on Nov. 16.