Brooklyn: a warm immigrant tale
Print Edition
BROOKLYN” is a story for anyone who has ever left home. It’s a story for those who’ve waffled in indecision, for those forming their identities and forging their own paths. It’s a story awash in muted pastel nostalgia about family and love and ambition and heritage and goodbyes. And it’s one of the loveliest films to grace cinemas this year.
There’s very little drama in this tale of a young woman, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), who leaves her small Irish town and her mother and sister in the 1950s to find a life and career in New York.
Eilis is cripplingly homesick at first, but she’s not mistreated at work. She doesn’t suffer extreme hardships or experience any prejudice for her background or gender. Her family doesn’t disown her. Her boyfriend doesn’t harbor dark secrets and the priest (Jim Broadbent) who gets her a job, a place to live, and a spot at a night college is actually just there to help and support. If anything, “Brooklyn,” based on Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel, challenges the viewer to focus on the heart by not having any such dramatic crutches. Eilis just has to work and figure out what she wants.
We meet her first at a dead end job as a shop girl in the tiny town of Enniscorthy, but she’s already got a way out. Her sister has made an appeal to an Irish priest living in New York who’s agreed to sponsor her trip across the Atlantic and set up a job and housing. Eilis knows it’s the only way to get her life started even though she’s heartbroken to leave.
Ronan, who has proven herself to be one of our most talented ingenues, makes Eilis a leading lady that we usually don’t get to see. She’s smart and ambitious, but still quiet and reflective. She’s polite, but not a pushover. She’s good, but not prudish. She’s pretty, too, but in an understated way that makes most men overlook her.
Unlike the girls around her, Eilis is not obsessed or even the least bit concerned with finding a man. And yet one finds her — a small, sweet, slightly doltish but well-intentioned Italian-New Yorker plumber Tony (Emory Cohen) who she slowly and believably falls for.
In the midst of their courtship, a tragedy brings her back to Ireland where she meets and begins a flirtation with the handsome Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson).
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