“Brooklyn” is a powerful film about love, sacrifice and cultural assimilation in a new place. Directed by John Crowley, the film tells the story of a young woman named Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) and her decision to move from Ireland to America. In search of work and a new way of life, she sails for the New World, alone, with nothing more than her own ambition.
After a tumultuous boat ride across the Atlantic, Eilis arrives at Ellis Island and is given little advice other than to not look like a tourist. She ends up staying in a boarding house for other women her age. The tenants have meals together, crack occasional jokes, and receive strict orders from their landlady, Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), to never say the Lord’s name in vain.
Unlike most immigrant stories about America, this one is not set in the 19th century. Eilis does not go to the Lower East Side but to Brooklyn, and she enters a prospering post-war America, rather than the poverty of the late 19th century. The film is set in the early 1950s, and the period attire, food, and cultural atmosphere of Brooklyn are incredibly well-realized.
Eilis gets a job at an upscale department store selling jewelry, and takes night classes in the hopes of becoming a bookkeeper. She pursues her burgeoning dreams and manages to write home rather frequently. One fateful night she goes to a dance in the basement of a local church, where she meets an Italian-American man her age named Tony (Emory Cohen) who quickly becomes smitten with her.
At first, Eilis is not convinced of Tony’s feelings and is, if anything, a bit confused. But she comes to fall for his sweet, gentlemanly manner, something of a rarity given the historical Irish-Italian divide.
Her future in America is connected to the future of the nation. This comes across most clearly in the scene in which her soon-to-be husband in America takes her to Long Island to imagine their future home. The film is optimistic about America in this sense – it is the era of “Singin’ in the Rain” and a hopeful future (1952), which seems to have some allure for Eilis.
Eilis shares a close-knit bond with her sister and widowed mother, and family tragedy calls her back to Ireland, where she is forced to question her ties to her motherland and to her newfound home in America.
She meets a privileged Irishman named Jim Farrell, and the film reveals the strain that has developed in her relationship with Tony. Here screenwriter Nick Hornby’s script affectingly parallels Eilis’ romantic and cultural conflicts. The resolution to this particular arc reveals her character’s growth in a satisfying, nuanced fashion.
More importantly, the film avoids cultural stereotypes, for the most part – the Irish are not characterized by their drinking and the Italians are not part of crime families or presented as totally insular.
In fact, Tony’s family warmly welcomes the Irish girl at the table, despite some initial embarrassment from Tony’s younger brother’s comments about Italians not liking the Irish. The only conventional image perhaps is of the benevolent priest, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), but he is there to suggest the cohesion of the Irish community in America, given the important role churches played for immigrants at any time of their arrival.
The film draws a vivid contrast between post-war America and post-war Ireland. The latter is presented as having a somewhat more rigid class structure and as a place of small town gossip where everyone knows everyone else’s business. But neither Ireland nor America is vilified or painted too harshly. In this way, the film moves beyond simple caricatures of these lands and makes the difficulty of Eilis’ decision on where to stay more accessible to the audience.
“Brooklyn” is a smartly written film that deals with issues of identity, love and loss. It is a slow, patient drama, one that frames its characters lovingly, lingering on their faces and focusing tenderly on their emotions.
Isaac Simon can be reached at [email protected].
