Screens: Ann Hornaday on Prescience of 'The Deal' and 'The Magdalene Sisters'

When it comes to politics and culture, movies are usually a lagging indicator. With their months-long production schedules and the vagaries of marketing, even films that have been ripped from the headlines can take up to two years to hit theaters.

But once in a while a movie manages to be ahead of its time and, when the events it chronicles finally make their way into public consciousness, brings them out of the distant realm of "someone else's problems" and into vivid, immediate life.

Two movies, both made in the United Kingdom over the past several years and readily available on DVD, seem particularly timely now: "The Deal," Stephen Frears's piquant portrait of the friendship and fateful political alliance forged by Labor Party leaders and future British prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and "The Magdalene Sisters," a scathing fictional drama set in 1960s Ireland in a Catholic home for "fallen" women.

Considering the financial scandals that have erupted on Brown's watch, Labor Party setbacks and a persona that runs the gamut from dour to drab, it's hard to feel sympathy for Brown. But after watching "The Deal," which was written by Peter Morgan ("The Queen") and appeared on Britain's Granada network in 2003, it's impossible not to come away with a sense of confounded empathy for the man.

The film stars David Morrissey as Brown, depicted in "The Deal" as a brilliant, hardworking, unfailingly self-serious Pygmalion to Blair's smooth, canny, unfailingly opportunistic Galatea. Michael Sheen plays Blair, a role he would reprise a few years later in "The Queen," also directed by Frears. If he doesn't bear the uncanny physical resemblance to his character that Morrissey achieves by way of gesture, posture and protruding his lower lip, Sheen thoroughly embodies those qualities that made Blair such a blazingly successful political phenom: the ever-ready smile, the willingness to dispense with Labor Party pieties and, most important, the unerring media savvy. (At one point Blair urges Brown to greet a new star of the British TV series "EastEnders." "That's real power," he whispers. "She gets 15 million viewers three times a week."

According to "The Deal," Blair and Brown had an unspoken agreement that, when Margaret Thatcher's conservative revolution finally waned, the far more experienced and learned Brown would become the Labor Party leader and, concomitantly, prime minister. Underling Blair would then dutifully follow in his mentor's footsteps. But when Brown refuses to run for the "big job" against longtime party leader John Smith, Blair sees it as a tacit capitulation. When Smith dies suddenly in 1994, Blair smoothly goes for the very jugular that Brown earlier disdained. (Morgan based his script on James Naughtie's 2001 book "The Rivals," about the Blair-Brown relationship.)

A taut and absorbing character study-cum-political thriller, "The Deal" is particularly edifying now that Brown is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Like a high-stakes version of the Goofus and Gallant morality tale, or the set piece in which Lucy pulls the football away just as Charlie Brown begins to kick, the Brown-Blair narrative still hews to its essential principles, even with Blair out of the picture.

And those fundamentals apply even in showbiz: Blair will get yet another third term in the 2011 HBO movie "The Special Relationship," written and directed by Morgan and starring -- who else? -- Blair's cinematic doppelganger, Sheen. Meanwhile, Brown faces calls for an early election in Britain, which will almost certainly result in his ouster. Lucy, grab your football.

The hapless Gordon Brown was portrayed in another TV movie, 2007's "The Trial of Tony Blair." In that speculative fantasy, Brown was portrayed by the fantastic Scottish actor Peter Mullan, who in 2002 went behind the camera to write and direct "The Magdalene Sisters." Anyone who saw that searing account of sadism and suffering at the hands of Irish nuns no doubt had flashes of deja vu when reading this month of the Irish government commission that found thousands of instances of sexual, physical and emotional abuse in Ireland's Catholic institutions from 1930 to 1990.

"The Magdalene Sisters" presented an anguished portrait of cruelty suffered by a group of unwed mothers at the hand of a monstrous nun (portrayed by Geraldine McEwan with acidic brutality). When the film was nearing release, the lay group the Catholic League accused it of "Catholic bashing" and demanded that Disney cut its ties with the film's distributor and Disney subsidiary, Miramax. (Mullan was inspired to make "The Magdalene Sisters" after seeing a 1998 TV documentary about the real-life Magdalene Asylum and its survivors.)

Indeed, upon first viewing, it would be easy to accuse "The Magdalene Sisters" of going too far in its portrayal of extreme, even perverse physical and psychological violence, from beatings and near-starvation to sexual humiliation. But with the recent release of the Irish government's 2,600-page report and its chronicle of rapes, molestations, beatings, scaldings and routine rituals of verbal denigration, the film suddenly seems utterly, urgently of its time. As one survivor of an Irish institution told Mullan after seeing his film, the reality was actually much worse. But "The Magdalene Sisters" bears watching, if only to help imagine the unimaginable.