Actress’s Irish heritage a perfect fit for starring role in new John Crowley film.
Brooklyn is a simple story affectingly told, bridging the emotional gulf one feels when ambition and home are an ocean apart and love is uncertain in either place.
John Crowley presents interior struggles and intimate epiphanies in his handsome and faithful screen adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed novel. The film is like a fairy tale in its depiction of the geographical and emotional voyage of timid Irish lass Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), who is forced to grow up in a hurry when hard times bring her to early-1950s America.
Ronan inhabits her role, delivering a performance of quiet strength where a glance means as much as any of the well-crafted lines of the script by Nick Hornby ( An Education), justifying the Oscar talk that began immediately following the film’s world premiere at Sundance last January.
There are also splendid turns by Emory Cohen and Domhnall Gleeson as complicated suitors and Julie Walters as a quotable rooming house landlady.
Eilis travels to America more by accident than by design. She lives with her mother and older sister in the small town of Enniscorthy in southeast Ireland, a place where the 20th century seems not to have arrived yet — and neither has the woman’s liberation movement that will soon change the world. Men and the Roman Catholic Church still claim divine right to rule, so when well-meaning priest Father Flood (Jim Broadbent) summons Eilis to join him and other Irish expatriates in America, she’s obliged to book passage on an ocean voyage west. There’s not much keeping her in Ireland, where both employment and romantic prospects are slim. Father Flood finds Eilis both rooming-house lodging and a job upon her arrival in Brooklyn, but for the homesickness that threatens to consume her, he can offer only the cold comfort of comparing it to other illnesses: “It will make you feel wretched, then it will move on to somebody else.”
Her mood is soon brightened by Tony (Cohen), an Italian plumber Eilis meets at a dance.
He takes her to Coney Island and introduces her to his family, seeming more interested in serious romance than she is — but it’s clear she’s not sure what she wants.
Then fate requires a sudden return visit to Ireland, where the magnificent empty beaches and a quiet man named Jim (Gleeson) have Eilis wondering on which side of the Atlantic her heart belongs.
It’s one of the many pleasures of Brooklyn that it chooses authenticity over sentimentalism, with Yves Be- langer’s lustrous cinematography giving the picture an authentic feel of time and place, as does François Seguin’s stellar production design and Michael Brook’s subtly poignant score.
Yet when the film reaches its most dramatic moment with a single statement of fact, it’s an arrow straight to the heart.