Saorise Ronan is an Irish sales clerk finding her way in ‘Brooklyn.’
The word “magical” is often used for things that can’t be explained, and there’s a temptation to use it a lot in talking about “Brooklyn.”
Arguments can be made as to how the film achieves its effects, but what really matters is that “Brooklyn” locates and rides a river of intense emotion. This intensity is rarely overt, but it underlies almost every relationship and encounter in the film.
Based on the novel by Colm Toibin and adapted by Nick Hornby, it’s an immigrant story, which makes it a quintessentially American story, with points of connection for anyone whose family arrived at Ellis Island. The details are specific and true to the experience of a young Irishwoman who comes to America in 1951, but the issues and the emotions can be understood by anyone. There’s suffocating homesickness and breathless aspiration, not to mention the awful pressure of being young and having to choose your life path when you really have no basis for choosing, other than instinct.
Most effective movie protagonists want something desperately, but Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) is an exception. She is someone with great longing, but her longings are in conflict with each other for most of the movie. Somehow this is no problem in terms of drama but a virtue of the story and even a point of fascination. From the beginning, the movie establishes Eilis’ probity, innate dignity and courage, and we’re happy just to watch her try to make her way in life.
The decision to move to America isn’t even hers. When we meet her, she is living in a little village in Ireland, with her no-nonsense older sister (Fiona Glascott, lovely in a small role) and her mother. Because Eilis can’t find work in town, her sister writes to an Irish priest in New York, who finds Eilis a sales-clerk job in a high-end department store. So arrangements are made for Eilis to move to Brooklyn and have a life she never expected.
One of the beautiful things about “Brooklyn” is that before the movie takes leave of Ireland, the audience is made to understand the limits and the advantages of Eilis’ life there. With no schmaltz or soaring soundtrack, but rather with simple well-played scenes, we understand the fierceness of Eilis’ bond with her sister. We see the simplicity and the warmth she has grown up in as well as the appeal of living in a place where everybody knows everybody.
The Brooklyn that Eilis travels to in 1951 is still the Brooklyn of early20th-century legend, a place reached by ship, with immigrants from everywhere, brownstone buildings and a National League baseball team that plays at Ebbets Field. Aboard the ship, sailing to her new life, she tells someone where she is heading, and you realize, with a sense of awe, how the aspirations of people from all over the world once fixed on Brooklyn, of all places.
How will Eilis fare? That this question is so engrossing has much to do with our belief in this New World — director John Crowley and his designers render the Brooklyn of 60 years ago in loving detail, finding a balance between perfect accuracy and perfect memory. It has also to do with Ronan, who is the kind of actress whose thoughts and emotions are so full that the director can just leave the camera on her face in close-up, and we’ll feel a constant flow of vital information. She has a wonderful look in this film, a sort of cross between an average young woman in a vintage newsreel and Botticelli’s Venus.
Exuding a masculine sweetness not seen since David Eigenberg on “Sex and the City,” Emory Cohen plays Tony, the Italian-American guy that she meets at a dance. Julie Walters has a featured and quite funny role as the Irishwoman running a boardinghouse for women in Brooklyn, and Domhnall Gleeson has a slow-burning charm as a suitor back in Ireland.
The magic of “Brooklyn” can’t be analyzed, but something in the richness of its relationships puts an essential truth before us — the brevity and immensity of life. We know all about that, of course, but that’s the beauty of great art: It takes what you already know and makes you feel it.