Directed by: John Crowley.
Written by: Nick Hornby based on the novel by Colm Tóibín.
Starring: Saoirse Ronan (Eilis), Emory Cohen (Tony), Domhnall Gleeson (Jim Farrell), Jim Broadbent (Father Flood), Jane Brennan (Mary Lacey), Julie Walters (Mrs. Kehoe), Fiona Glascott (Rose), Brid Brennan (Miss Kelly), Eileen O'Higgins (Nancy), Peter Campion (George Sheridan), Emily Bett Rickards (Patty), Eve Macklin (Diana), Nora-Jane Noone (Sheila), Samantha Munro (Dorothy), Jessica Paré (Miss Fortini), Jenn Murray (Dolores), James DiGiacomo (Frankie Fiorello).
Saoirse
Ronan delivers one of the best performances of the year as Eilis, a smart,
capable young Irish lass – who has no job prospects in her small town, outside
of working at the general store a few hours on Sunday. Her bookkeeper sister
wrote a Priest she knows in America, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent) who agrees to
sponsor Eilis to move to Brooklyn – getting a job at a fancy department store,
leaving in a boarding house with other, young women, presided over by a
wonderfully comic Julie Walters, start taking courses at the local school – in the
hopes of one day being an accountant (did I, an accountant, love this movie
because it may be the first time cinema history that an accountant is not
portrayed as a pathetic loser? Maybe). In Brooklyn, she meets Tony (Emory Cohen
– channeling a kinder, gentler version a young Marlon Brando) – an Italian
plumber, and falls in love. Then, a family tragedy strikes, and she heads back
to Ireland for what is supposed to be a short while – and meets Jim Farrell
(Domhnall Gleeson – for once not playing a nerd), and there is more confusion.
What
makes Ronan’s performance so amazing is the subtlety in which she does pretty
much everything – how she appears on the verge of tears at times in those early
months in America, but doesn’t want anyone to see that. Those first, tentative flirtations
with Tony, and how simultaneously terrified and happy she is when he tells her
he loves her. Little-by-little, she grows more confident while living in
Brooklyn – and she’s taking steps towards happiness, and away from the sadness
of leaving Ireland. And then, amazingly, the performance shifts when she
returns to Ireland. She always felt out of place in Brooklyn, being Irish, and
now she out of place in Ireland, being a Brooklyn girl. She also, quite
clearly, sees how her entire small town – especially her mother – is almost
pushing her and Jim together. It’s not altogether unfair to say that Eilis
remakes herself into the image that the town wants to her to be, a kind of
self-imposed version of what Kim Novak did late in Vertigo for Jimmy Stewart.
For a while, I think, she even starts to believe that version of herself – but a
late conflict with an old rival snaps her out of it. This is immediately
followed by a quietly devastating scene with her mother that should be enough
to emotionally crush any viewer.
The
film’s screenplay is the best work (for the screen anyway) done yet by Nick
Hornby, adapting the novel by Colm Tóibín, that resists the urge to underline
every passage, or vocalize too much. He has written a screenplay in which only
one character is what you would call bad – and not really, just nosy – and she’s
barely in the book. Every character in the film makes decisions that make
sense, that are not driven selfishness or anything else – but some of them are
still going to be crushed, because that’s the way life is. The film was
directed by John Crowley – clearly doing the best work of his career (although
when you directed a couple of episodes of the awful True Detective Season 2
that may not being saying much). He, wisely, chooses to make Brooklyn in a
dreamily romantic film. It’s easy to make Ireland look beautiful – especially small
town, ocean adjacent Ireland – and he does, but he also makes Brooklyn look
beautiful as well – especially during all of streetlamp lit strolls Tony and
Eilis take. Realistic? Maybe not, but this is better.
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