The story is set in 1952 when Eilis Lacey (Saoirse
Ronan) who’s spent her whole life in Enniscorthy, a town in southern Ireland,
emigrates for a better life in New York. She arrives and settles in Brooklyn
where she takes up in an Irish boarding house and works at a department store.
She spends a while being homesick, but it alleviates when she meets an Italian
blue-collar guy Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). Their romance blooms, but there
are soon problems when something happens back home and Eilis is torn between
two worlds.
This film reminds me a lot of last year’s The
Immigrant, a slightly underrated movie starring Marion Cotillard. And even
though this film is tonally different and has a much more significant emphasis
on the romance, what really makes Brooklyn stand out are the
performances. I’ve been waiting for years for Saoirse Ronan to be given a role
like this (especially after The Host) and she kills it! The film really
does hinge on her and she delivers. You feel her homesickness, her acceptance
of her new situation, and all her other emotions once later events take place.
It’s certainly an Oscar calibre performance. Emory Cohen for a relative
newcomer is also really good and his character makes for a nice ethnic contrast
to Eilis. And Domhnall Gleeson just has to be in everything this year! He plays
Jim Farrell a love interest of Eilis’ in Ireland making for a minor love
triangle. But he’s very likeable too and like in Ex Machina, The
Revenant, and to a different extent Star Wars, Gleeson gives his all
to the role. The supporting cast also includes Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters
putting on Irish accents but performing decently enough.
Even though the story is fairly pedestrian, it does do
a few things interestingly. It captures pretty adequately the experience of
immigrating in the 1950s. My father’s family immigrated to Canada a few years
after this film takes place and the depiction of the cross-Atlantic journey
feels very real. Director John Crowley does a good job of placing you in the
situation. Brooklyn does feel alien, and you identify more with Eilis
especially as we’ve all been in a similar situation at some point. The
relationship between Eilis and Tony also feels real if maybe a bit too modern.
And though the film is a romance, Eilis is definitely the focus and especially
in the latter half, it becomes an emotional conflict and character piece. The
last third does take a couple turns from what you’d expect and there’s even a
somewhat eerie Invasion of the Body Snatchers analogue to it. And by
that point I was surprised how much I was invested in Eilis.
So though not sensational, Brooklyn is
definitely a surprise. I was surprised by how it absorbed you into its world,
how the emotional conflict and character drove an otherwise dull narrative, and
mostly how good of a performance Ronan gave. It’s not one of the best films of
the year as there are some of those more formulaic romantic devices and it struggles
at times to keep your interest; but it is a decent film that’s well-plotted and
well-performed, and deserves a degree of the acclaim its receiving.
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