BROOKLYN – The Review

Photo by Kerry Brown. © 2015 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

By Cate Marquis

On the surface, BROOKLYN is about a young Irish woman in the 1950s moving to American to start a new life, but it is also about anyone growing up and moving away from home, whether that is going away to college or moving away to a new city for a job. The film deals with the loneliness, the homesickness, and the strangeness of being somewhere new, and all the adjustments and changes that brings. It also deals with how it feels to go back home after that. It is a story that will make anyone who has experienced that ache with remembered things. It is a meditation on identity, self-discovery and life-choices, full of nuances and shadings, set in a lovely nostalgic landscape.

Beautifully photographed and beautifully acted as well, BROOKLYN is a lovely film based on Irish writer Colm Toibin’s novel of the same name, and directed by John Crowley (“Boy A”) with a screenplay written by Nick Hornby.  Set in Toibin’s small rural hometown, the story is about a young Irish woman, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), who moves to America in the 1950s and then later returns to Ireland after a family tragedy. Eilis is struggling with only a part-time job, working for a boss who belittles her at every opportunity, in her small rural Irish town. At the insistence of her affectionate older sister (Fiona Glascott), who sees only a limited future for Eilis in Ireland, their mother (Jane Brennan) writes to an Irish priest (Jim Broadbent) living in New York, asking him to find her a job and place to stay in America. Eilis herself is less sure about he move but, shy, uncertain and frightened, she boards a ship for the trip across the ocean.

Many American families have stories of an immigrant ancestor, tales they tell of grandma or grandpa coming from the Old Country, stories tinged with nostalgia. BROOKLYN evokes some of that with its period setting and old-fashioned atmosphere. At the same time, this is tale for any young person leaving home, a timeless experience.

In Brooklyn, the kindly priest has found her a room at a boarding house with other Irish immigrant girls and a job at a department store.  She quickly learns that Brooklyn, a place full of immigrants like herself, is not the New York she imagined. It is all very strange, and Eilis aches with homesickness. But the sympathetic priest helps her adjust and the landlady (Julie Walters) at the boardinghouse is a kind of sharp-tongued mother hen, who helps Eilis figure out her new home. A sophisticated supervisor at work (Jessica Paré) helps her learn to dress like an American woman, and fellow residents at the boardinghouse, who were once as green as she is, help her figure out life in Brooklyn as well.

She meets a young Italian man, Tony (Emory Cohen) who is smitten with her, while she is more cautious.  In one funny, charming scene, Eilis’ friends at the boardinghouse help her practice how to eat spaghetti properly, twirling it on her fork, so she can eat dinner with Tony’s almost stereotypically Italian family without embarrassing herself.

A family tragedy brings her back home to Ireland. Like everyone who has gone away, she sees the place through new eyes, and the people back home see her in a new way as well. Looking polished and poised in her fashionable American clothes, Eilis possesses a new self-confidence and presence. She draws the attention of a young local aristocrat, Jim (Domhnall Gleeson), someone who never would have noticed her before, and the frisson of the new romantic possibility forces her to consider whether to stay or go back to Brooklyn.

The two suitors are stand-ins for the two homes as much as anything, but one of the strengths of the film is its ability to work well on several levels. It is both a personal story and a universal one, a love story and a metaphor for life, a period piece and one of the present. Credit for that has to go to many people – Toibin for his haunting, complex yet simple story, Nick Hornby for his adaptation and John Crowley for his skillful direction. And to star Saoirse Ronan, whose performance in her first really grown-up role is brilliant and effecting, a performance already being mentioned for an Oscar nomination.

All the story takes place in landscapes that have a nostalgic period loveliness, from the old-fashioned brink streets of Brooklyn to the polished ’50s department store, to the charm of the little Irish town and Eilis’ pretty ’50s costumes. In one scene, Tony takes Eilis to Coney Island, and in a quiet, open corner, he talks about building a home there and starting his own business. It is a scene that evokes visions of what lies ahead for the country – growing suburbs and news businesses in the economic boom of the later ’50s and ’60s, but these are unknowns to Eilis and the characters in the film. In a parallel scene, Eilis and Jim with a pair of friends have a day at the seashore in Ireland, a visually beautiful scene, where she contemplates her choices and future, while gazing across the ocean.

Because it works so well on so many levels, BROOKLYN is a near-perfect film about growing up, leaving home and returning, and about choosing one’s own life.

BROOKLYN opens in St. Louis on Friday, November, 20, 2015.

OVERALL RATING: 5 OUT OF 5 STARS