The 1950s-era drama Brooklyn possesses the unique ability to break your heart while it simultaneously renews your faith in humanity. In what could have been a setup for sentimentality in lesser hands, director John Crowley fine tunes the heartstrings into a stellar chamber piece of emotionally intense filmmaking. When young Irish immigrant Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) rolls with the punches on two different continents only to find herself in a conundrum over the incredibly weighty choices she is forced to make, it’s pure magic.
Twenty-one-year-old Ronan (an Oscar nominee at 13 years of age for Atonement) is a joy to behold. We essentially watch a young girl become a woman right before our eyes. Gifted by her sister and her widowed mom a passage to New York from her native County Wexford, Eilis arrives in Brooklyn under the watchful eye of rooming house maven Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters in a pip performance) and Irish priest, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). She begins a job at Bartocci’s department store in Brooklyn Heights, where she is at first told to smile more. After she meets an Italian plumber at a dance arranged by Father Flood, her smiling at work is as wide as the ocean separating New York harbor from the cliffs of Moher.
Then, abruptly, a death in the family brings her back to Ireland, and just like that her life comes to a crossroads. At this point events seem to be happening to her independent of her own will. Yet Nick Hornby’s screenplay (an adaptation of the Colm Toibin novel) enriches the situation with a welcome ambivalence. As they become more and more crucial, Eilis’ decisions seem barely to be crafted by her. Yet on another level she is purely immersed in forging the outcome of her own fate.
An old fashioned film in the best sense of the expression, Brooklyn is the holiday movie you can take even your cranky friends to–the same friends prone to whine about films that are too stylistic, too obscure, too depressing. Brooklyn contains no highbrow artifice yet if you’re looking for the dumbed down, you won’t find that either. Its elegiac, luminous tone is a perfect fit for its superb mastery of atmosphere and craftsmanship. The 1950s depicted here feel mighty real; the underlying theme, eternal. Feel-good movies are rarely this ingeniously bittersweet–nor are their heroines this PlainJane charming.