To Brooklyn and Back

  Brooklyn is an Irish, a British, and a Canadian production, which I think is an appropriate parallel to the multiple cultural identities portrayed and at odds in this film. In some ways Brooklyn is a paint-by-numbers romance just with an immigrant angle, but in other ways it’s surprisingly engaging and immersive.

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.