BROOKLYN
DIRECTOR: John Crowley
CAST: Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Dohmnall Gleeson, Jane Brennan, Jim Broadbent, Fiona Glascott
CLASSIFICATION: 10-12 PG S
RUNNING TIME:111 minutes
RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
WISTFUL AND CHARMING, this romantic coming of age drama is ably carried by Saoirse Ronan’s finely drawn performance. The camera lingers on her expressive face with great effect, humanising big ideas around immigration, family and home within her keenly-felt experience.
Focusing on old-fashioned storytelling, director John Crowley keeps everything lowkey, allowing the period piece niceties – the gorgeous old Brooklyn brownstones, elegant costuming and delightful knicknacks – to simply be the background.
On the surface, the film’s simplicity and light touch seems to gloss over the darker aspects of immigration (check out James Gray’s 2013 Immigrant for the twisted darkness). But, the sunnier outlook is not because of a wilful disregard of the pain of deciding to leave your family for a new life – instead, this is because the main character grows from a timid wallflower into a person who is confident in her own ability to deal with the world.
Ronan is understated, but over about two hours, she transforms from a shy purse-lipped person who hunches in on herself, into an articulate woman who walks tall.
She is Eilis Lacey, a reserved young woman who leaves her mother’s home in Enniscorthy, Ireland for faster-paced Brooklyn, New York where she has a job lined up in a department store. Whilst dealing with the culture shock of a new place and strange, brash people Eilis doesn’t see how every small decision she makes changes her.
Instead, homesick and missing her family, Eilis at first struggles to make the adjustment, but once she befriends first-generation Italian-American Tony Fiorello (Cohen) she imagines a future for herself in this new place.
But then she returns to Ireland after her beloved sister’s death and it seems like everyone is conspiring to keep her back on the Emerald Isle. She has to figure out where home truly lies.
The film walks a tense line between loss and the pursuit of happiness as Eilis finds out the hard way that following the path you have set for yourself might mean hurting the ones you love. That’s not to say it is all serious and stern stuff. Julie Walters pops up as the acerbic yet delightful Mrs Kehoe, Eilis’s landlady at her boardinghouse and there are some amusing diningroom scenes.
Emory Cohen makes for a sweet and charming suitor as Tony and the believable chemistry with Ronan reflects the way two properly-raised youngsters from the ’50s would have gone about courtship.
Ultimately the film works because as movie star gorgeous as the costumes and sets may be, the emotions and actions of the people are very real – from Eilis’s pinch-faced ex-boss’s petty meanness to her mother’s emotional distance when she says goodbye or Tony’s admission to his younger brother that the boy’s booksmarts outweigh his own.
“But I will never see her again,” comes the realisation when Eilis finds out her sister has died and she finally understands what this great adventure in America is going to cost her.
If you liked The Immigrant or Atonement, you will like this.