“The Miracle Club” is a downbeat Irish Catholic character study in a minor key, a period piece about the tragedy, desperation and simple superstition that sends the faithful to the French shrine at Lourdes in search of “the cure.”

What recommends the film is the sadness of it all, as it isn’t just physical maladies that motivates these characters to seek the salvation of “Our Lady.” Grief, guilt and regrets bond these women on their 1967 pilgrimage. And the fact that their ranks include Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith and Oscar nominee Laura Linney makes it an acting showcase for legends of the silver screen.

An old woman has died in Ballygar. Her estranged daughter Chrissie (Linney) has come all the way from Boston, but just missed the viewing and church service. Father Dermot (Mark O’Halloran) is full of reassurances that her mother was loved and will be missed, but Chrissie seems disconnected from that. She just wants to know who paid for the flowers, so she can pay them back.

Her mother had been organizing a church talent show/fundraiser, whose top prize is tickets to the church-sponsored bus tour/pilgrimage to Lourdes. Mother Maureen had a ticket to go, but her niece Eileen (Bates) and oldest friend Lily (Smith) formed a singing trio in the hopes of winning their way their way onto the bus.

Their third singer, Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) has a 4 year-old boy who hasn’t spoken yet, and Lily isn’t singing to seek a “miracle” for the club foot she was born with. She wants to help Dolly. That’s Eileen’s motivation, too. That, and this worrisome lump in her breast.

They all have disapproving, doubting and absurdly-needy husbands (Mark McKenna, Niall Bugger and Oscar nominee Stephen Rea) they could use a break from. Eileen’s big, clingy Catholic family and all their problems are another motivation for her to flee.

And then there’s the stark and secret connection the older women share, hinted at by the seawall shrine Lily visits almost daily to a son who drowned there 40 years before. Something still has Eileen carrying an ugly grudge, Lily wracked by grief and Chrissie hardened to loss and regret.

Veteran Irish director Thaddeus O’Sullivan (“Nothing Personal”) does well by his leading ladies, showcasing Bates in a role that calls for mercurial turns of temperament — testy, sarcastic, tender and vulnerable. Eileen’s to-her-face insults to Chrissie are jaw-droppingly cruel and Bates’ accent easily passes the ear-test. Smith’s Lily is the most devout and seemingly the most magnimous. But her magnanimity can flash its nasty edge when it comes to Chrissie.

Linney’s Chrissie is harder to pin down, a woman who almost regrets showing up for her mother’s funeral because she can trace a lifetime of hurt and damage to this town and these people. Her decision to join the pilgrimage is the most abrupt and contrived.

O’Sullivan gets a little out of the lighter moments, and the film’s budget precludes making the bus tour anything but digitally-augmented perfunctory. We see the same bus and same set-dressing Mini and Citroen in scene after scene.

But they all do justice to Lourdes as an experience that’s holy, and wholly commercialized ballyhoo. Some of the best-written scenes have the ladies’ illusions stripped away, cynicism almost overwhelming them and the priest hastening to explain that you don’t come to Lourdes for a “miracle,” but for the strength to “carry on” when no miracle is forthcoming.

I also liked the way the characters address the burdens of being a woman in a country and a time where the Church dictated a ban on not just abortion, but birth control, and staked an unholy claim on unwed mothers and their babies. Shared tales of attempted miscarriages are have a hint of desperation, and an almost comical resignation about them.

But this uneven and often unsatisfying dramedy’s saving grace might be the sadness that permeates the sunny settings, the sunny bus ride and the beatific awe they feel upon reaching that holy grotto and giving themselves over to the water “cure” machinery the nuns there run.

“The heartbreak of the world is upon us,” Lily declares, and so it is. And no “miracles” will alleviate it. Only a tiny dollop of closure delivered with compassion helps, and even that’s never really enough. Evolving, liberating “change” is the subtext this “Club” hints at but never really grapples.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and some language

Cast: Kathy Bates, Maggie Smith, Laura Linney, Agnes O’Casey, Mark O’Halloran and Stephen Rea.

Credits: Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, scripted by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne. A Sony Classics release.

Running time: 1:31