Stella Days: Martin Sheen’s Wee Trip to His Irish Roots

Stella Days (2011) Poster

Stella Days is unashamed of its gentle blarney heart.  Martin Sheen gives a graceful, thoughtful performance as the Gaelic priest suffering a crisis of faith in a wee 1950′s Irish hamlet undergoing modernization (electricity is coming) and a church determined to keep its customary control of the local hearts and minds.  Sheen’s Father Daniel Barry cause is to embrace the change by adding a cinema despite the throw back reaction of a conservative town leader, played with no shading by Stephen Rhea.  The director Thaddeus O’Sullivan delicate hand tends to disperse the movies rougher black versus light  themes (adultery, domestic abuse and the entrenched power of the clergy) into relaxed cast performances and subplots that echo the main thematic points,  establishing a thoughtful, lived-in feel for Sheen’s embattled, closeted soul to re-discover its true path.   Stella Days  gets a B.

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