BROOKLYN
Fox Searchlight
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: A-
Director: John Crowley
Written by: Nick Hornby, based on Colm Toibin’s novel
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters, Jessica Pare
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 10/23/15
Opens: November 6, 2015
You don’t have to live in Brooklyn to enjoy this movie immensely but if you do, “Brooklyn” has even more resonance than that given by the terrific performance from Saoirse Ronan. The movie’s simple mention or The Brooklyn Dodgers can bring tears to the eyes of a Brooklynite like me who concers that team’s move to the West Coast as a near disaster. Cite Coney Island, as writer scripter Nick Hornby does in a screenplay based on Colm Toibin’s novel, and you think of how your dad gave you a dollar in 1945, about the same amount as your friends received from their folks, an amount which gave us four hours of fun in Coney Island where Nathan’s hot dogs were fifteen cents and a bag of fries the same. But “Brooklyn” is a lot more than a nostalgic trip to the “fourth largest city” in the United States, one that has increasing neighborhoods gentrified and where rents, just $69 a month if I recall my dad’s bills in 1945, now $3,000 and up if you’re lucky. Brooklyn may have been a lot like home to an immigrant from Ireland who would note that the cops were all Irish and the borough drew folks from Dublin to Enniscorthy.
Enough about geography, because “Brooklyn” is really a love story, a romance about the Emerald Isle and about the New World and mostly about a young woman, a film convincingly and exquisitely performed, with director John Crowley’s overseeing a striking period without a word of vulgarity or a description of a man who is anything but a gentleman and women whose personalities range from giggly to gossipy to sad and lonely. Some call this a chick-flick but that is reductive, hardly the case. “Brooklyn” has universal charm as does Colm Toibin’s novel (which you will be tempted to pick up at Amazon for just $9.44).
In the 1950s, a decade or so before people would commute between Europe and the United States by air, folks who wanted a new life away from the sameness of the old—where, as Eilis Lacy (Saoirse Ronan) decides the young men all wore grease in their hair and blazers on their bodies—would take a ship to New York where many would pass through Ellis Island. Eilis, who lives with her mother and sister and works in a small bakery, lucks out by getting her priest (Jim Broadbent) to arrange for her visa and a job. After she passes immigration where she is told to look as though she knows where she is going and for heaven’s sake don’t cough, she rooms at a boardinghouse under the strict supervision but vibrant sense of humor by Mrs. Keough (Julie Walters). At a dance she meets an Italian boy, Tony (Emory Chen), a plumber who courts her and introduces her to spaghetti—which she deftly handles back at the boardinghouse to the amazement of the young women who live there.
Eilis becomes all-American, dressing like a Yank, enrolling in Brooklyn College because she’d rather work with numbers in an office than in a posh department store. When her sister back home dies, she returns, but before that, Tony proposes and they marry. Back in Ireland Eilis is surprised to feel something for young Jim Farrell (Domhnal Gleeson) who has never been anywhere and who, since Eilis did not reveal that she is now Mrs. Fiorello, courts her. Ireland courts her as well, making her feel guilty about leaving, allowing her to make a fateful decision whether to abandon her new life and return to the security of “home” or to return to New York where the masses of people at Coney Island beach contrasts with the emptiness of the Irish sand.
Eilis’s journey from a shy, provincial gal to a secure woman, one who would fit in well with today’s feminist model, is captured slowly, convincingly, and with a sustained beauty of classic delivery in a film that evokes emotions from sadness to ecstasy and highlights an Oscar-worthy performance from Ms. Ronan.
Rated PG-13. 111 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – A-
Acting – A
Technical – B+
Overall – A-
