Brooklyn
Directed by: John Crowley
Written by: Nick Hornby - Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Brid Brennan, Fiona Glascott, Jane Brennan, Eileen O'Higgins, Emily Bett Rickards, Eve Macklin, Nora-Jane Noone, Samantha Monro, Eva Birthistle
Drama/Romance - 111 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 4 Nov 2015
Written by: Nick Hornby - Based on the novel by Colm Tóibín
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Brid Brennan, Fiona Glascott, Jane Brennan, Eileen O'Higgins, Emily Bett Rickards, Eve Macklin, Nora-Jane Noone, Samantha Monro, Eva Birthistle
Drama/Romance - 111 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 4 Nov 2015
A young girl warily climbs aboard a ship travelling to a strange land called Brooklyn away from everything she knows and loves back home in Ireland. She’s legally an adult now but far too slight, scared, and homesick to accomplish much more than dread what’s ahead of her, which folks assure her will open up a thousand more opportunities than what she could hope to have back home. I kept waiting for something awful to happen. Director John Crowley and writer Nick Hornby adapting the novel of the same name by Colm Tóibín would not show me a pretty young girl in 1952 immigrating to the New World and not have something truly atrocious befall her. Well, Brooklyn is not that type of film; meaning, it’s not what I expected. Young immigrant girls are supposed to get tricked, drugged, attacked, and/or sold into sex slavery. Brooklyn would never be so gauche. We follow a meek girl, personifying an entire nation of leavers, transform into a self-confident woman who runs into a fork in the road; two lives, you get to pick one.
The worse thing to happen to Eilis (Saoirse Ronan, The Grand Budapest Hotel) is a tearful bout of homesickness. Catholic Ireland in the ‘50s was not an emotive society; folks did not line up at the docks of departing ships to weep and wail at their beloveds as they slowly melted over the horizon. Eilis’s mother exchanges a look with her younger daughter and leaves the peer before the ship even pulls away. Eilis is leaving Enniscorthy, County Wexford; a small town where you are born, you marry, you birth your babies, and that’s it. Eilis’s big sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), funds the westward expedition knowing they will miss each other terribly and the start will be rough, but in the end, Eilis’s future is the most important thing.
The worse thing to happen to Eilis (Saoirse Ronan, The Grand Budapest Hotel) is a tearful bout of homesickness. Catholic Ireland in the ‘50s was not an emotive society; folks did not line up at the docks of departing ships to weep and wail at their beloveds as they slowly melted over the horizon. Eilis’s mother exchanges a look with her younger daughter and leaves the peer before the ship even pulls away. Eilis is leaving Enniscorthy, County Wexford; a small town where you are born, you marry, you birth your babies, and that’s it. Eilis’s big sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott), funds the westward expedition knowing they will miss each other terribly and the start will be rough, but in the end, Eilis’s future is the most important thing.
There is a surprising amount of humor in Brooklyn for what could have been one sad sack of an immigrant’s tale. Father Flood (Jim Broadbent, Cloud Atlas), a priest and old family friend, sponsors Eilis placing her in a nice boarding house, sets her up with a job in a fancy department store, and encourages her to continue her education at the local community college. The boarding house is run by Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), a stern landlady who has never met a topic suitable enough for the dinner table. Five young girls from the old country live under Mrs. Kehoe’s supervision and are consistently reminded that a giddy girl is the eighth deadly sin.
Brooklyn certainly casted up. Father Flood and Mrs. Kehoe are relatively minor characters in the film but Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent lend such a strong presence that Brooklyn punches a bit above its weight class in acting power. Saoirse Ronan, only 21, has already been on our theater screens for a little under a decade and even has an Oscar nomination from her turn as a confused adolescent in 2007’s Atonement. Most importantly, Ronan is believable as she transforms Eilis from a trembling waif into a determined adult. She is passive by nature but knows what she wants, at least in the beginning. The best she could do in Enniscorthy was a blazer-clad lad from the rugby club with too much oil product in his hair. Eilis knew enough that she didn’t want that.
Concerning narrative, Brooklyn treads a fine line between comedic drama and overboard romantic epic. Eilis’s gargantuan life choice involves boys, of course. Door number one is Tony (Emory Cohen, The Place Beyond the Pines), an apprentice plumber and the son of Italian immigrants who lives and breathes the Brooklyn Dodgers and has a thing for Irish girls. Door number two is Jim (Domhnall Gleeson, Ex Machina), one of those rugby boys on the verge of inheriting his parents’ pub but firmly attached to everything Eilis loves and misses about her homeland. What’s a girl to do?
If you let it, the whole plot can feel like first world immigrant girl problems. She has too many perfectly eligible bachelors lining up on her doorstep trying to slip an engagement ring on her finger. There is no right or wrong decision; one guy does not embody good while the other is sinister. The decision falls to Eilis as a developing human being balancing new ideas and experiences against the known and comfortable. She must sacrifice one for the other. It’s up to the audience to decide if she chooses correctly and for what reasons. I bet there is a 50/50 split on those who cheer her decision against those who wish she’d gone the other way. Some of the most memorable and effective films have a way of dividing their audiences in two.
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