Ask any good chef: why do some recipes work, while others, with the very same ingredients, do not? Ah, but it's the QUALITY of the ingredients that matters, that chef will probably say.

And so it is with Stephen Frears' "Philomena," a film whose cinematic recipe seems tricky at best: Take a shocking and tragic tale — a true one, involving the Catholic Church, no less — and make it into a film that's part serious drama, part jaunty road-buddy movie, and part comedy.

Such an unwieldy mix flirts with danger, even tastelessness, but "Philomena" works, thanks to the quality of its ingredients — especially the sensitive and nuanced performances by the ever-superb Judi Dench and by Steve Coogan, who also co-wrote the script.

Director Frears, carefully calibrating the tone here, is in fine form as he tackles a story based on the 2009 investigative book "The Lost Son of Philomena Lee," by Martin Sixsmith. Lee, still living today, is an Irish woman who, as a teenager, became pregnant during a fairground tryst, not even understanding the biology of such things. Rejected at home, she was sent to a convent where she endured a painful birth — and told the pain was penance for her sin — then forced to work in the laundry with other "fallen women" for years in virtual imprisonment, allowed to see her son for one hour a day.

Worse yet, the convent sold babies to wealthy Americans, and Philomena's son, Anthony, was carried off one day as a toddler, without so much as a goodbye to his mother.

The movie begins on Anthony's 50th birthday, with Philomena still desperate to find out what happened to him. Her adult daughter has a chance meeting with the former BBC journalist Sixsmith, who's just lost his government job amid scandal, and is in need of work. At first, Sixsmith, rather an Oxford snob, dismisses the tale as a "human interest" story.

But soon, Martin and Philomena are heading to Washington, where they make one astonishing discovery after another. And they discover things about each other, too. Philomena, it turns out, is chatty, cheerful and fond of romance novels. Martin is rather abrupt and snooty, and wants his "quiet time."

Will these opposites find common ground? Uh, have you ever seen a road movie? But there's more happening here, thankfully. Philomena, despite her devastating treatment by the Catholic Church, remains deeply religious and slow to blame the nuns who mistreated her. Martin is cynical about religion, and eager to achieve vindication for Philomena. But is that really what she wants?

And along with its religious, moral and character issues, the film also explores, more subtly, questions of journalistic ethics. The pair's trip to Washington is paid for by a tabloid keenly interested in the lurid aspects of the tale. But what about Philomena's privacy? Martin is helping her, of course, but is he exploiting her, too, for a story?

We wouldn't care about any of this if the performances were weak. But both actors find complexity and depth. Dench is not known for playing weak characters — M, from the Bond movies? Various British queens? — but she finds a way to imbue a simple, uneducated character with an inner strength and dignity.

Also notable: the touching Sophie Kennedy Clark as young Philomena. Cinematography by Robbie Ryan and editing by Valerio Bonelli contribute to a wonderfully natural feel to the frequent flashbacks and grainy home films.

 

?a ?? ?beit now from the perspective of a septuagenarian with a solid if sometimes trying marriage, plus kids and grandkids, a sweet tooth he shouldn't indulge, and a habit of losing things.

 

"I'm telling you now, I'm not afraid to say it, I lost my key," he tells the audience with leisurely yet manicured pacing: "It was given to me. I lost my key to the house. That was 48 years ago. I don't have a key."

The audience eats it up, rewarding Cosby, he says, with "a sense of how much they understand and trust" him.

"With that, it raises the self-esteem," he goes on, as if at this phase of his storied career self-esteem were ever at issue, "and I am now driving as a coachman would, with some horses that can really moooove out.

"But you don't want to go TOO fast," he cautions, "because you have the carriage you're on, the wheels, the balance."

Meanwhile, what you don't have, if you're Cosby, is jokes.

"NO jokes! I tell stories," he declares. "Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along."

That's what he discovered at Temple University in 1960, when, as a lad from a downtrodden Philly neighborhood, he rose to the challenge of his Remedial English professor. The assignment was to write a theme about the first time he'd ever done something. Cosby wrote an account of having pulled one of his own teeth. The professor gave him his first-ever A.

Not too much later, Cosby had vaulted to New York's Greenwich Village as a burgeoning stand-up. He speaks of consorting with the likes of Richie Havens, Richard Pryor and Peter, Paul and Mary — "people who were going to be somebody someday."

He landed a gig at a club on MacDougal Street "where I came on at 8 and left at 4 in the morning, and my job description was to break up the monotony of the folk singers.

"And over the club," he goes on, savoring the memory, "was a store that sold very cheap beads, things like that, and was run by a retired ventriloquist, an alcoholic. The story on him was, he had become jealous of his dummy and one night, in a drunken rage, he shot the dummy, then retired." Cosby is wearing a mischievous grin. "I'm serious!"

Soon he was a star, having soared after making a key decision as he surveyed other rising black comedians, who typically tailored their acts to their identity and experiences as black men.

"I figured, if Godfrey Cambridge does this, if Dick Gregory does this, there's no need for ALL of us to do it," Cosby says. "So I decided a very simple thing: I'm not going to tell you what color I am. If you're unsighted, your friends will tell you!"

But whatever your color, "you can identify with what I'm talking about. It goes all the way back to freshman Remedial English: I never said, 'And I looked at my black face and my tooth was white.'"

Cosby chuckles again at that messy self-extraction and adds, "There WAS a lot of red."