Brooklyn

Film (2015)

With Saoirse Ronan (Eilis), Jim Broadbent (Father Flood), Fiona Glascott (Rose), Julie Walters (Mrs. Kehoe), Jessica Paré (Miss Fortini), Emory Cohen (Tony), Ellen David (Mrs. Fiorello), Paulino Nunes (Mr. Fiorello), James DiGiacomo (Frankie Fiorello), Domhnall Gleeson (Jim Farrell)

Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) leaves her provincial town in Ireland in the early 1950s to seek her fortune in New York. Though leaving her mother and a beloved sister behind, she feels suffocated by the lack of opportunity in her little village. New York is big, boisterous and difficult, but she gradually finds her way and eventually starts going out with an Italian-American named Tony.

As a result of a flagging economy at home, about 50,000 Irish immigrated to the United States in the 1950s, and at least one quarter of them, like the protagonist in this exemplary piece of filmmaking, wound up in New York.

This film, faithful to the Colm Tóibín’s novel in most of its detail, is beautifully rendered. Almost every aspect of it is tastefully done. The acting is superb all around, and the production values – editing, cinematography, music, design – are all subtly and tastefully executed.

Psychologically and emotionally it is vividly told, perhaps even with some greater degree of nuance than the book.

Saoirse Ronan, all of twenty-one, who was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in Atonement (2007) when she was thirteen, gives an exquisite performance as Eilis, noble and vulnerable, poised and fragile. She ably conveys the pride of determined independence and the trials of distance from home and isolation from her family with compelling subtlety.

Emory Cohen is earthily charming as Tony, full of warmly slurring speech and streetwise, but adoring, glances.

Domnhall Gleason, who led in the delightful About Time (2013), and was seen in the charged film about Northern Ireland, Shadow Dancer (2013) and in Anna Karenina (2013), is gallant and appealing as Jim.

James DiGiacomo who plays Frankie, Tony’s eight year old brother, steals all the scenes in which he appears. The kid is a born film comic and totally hilarious on every line. It’s a scream when he comes out with … we don’t like Irish people. Hey, hey. What? We don’t. That is a well-known fact. Simple but brilliantly funny writing and superb delivery.

Jim Broadbent has a great couple of scenes as Father Flood, the decent older priest who helps Elys arrange things in the US.

Jessica Paré, known as Don Draper’s second wife in television’s Mad Men, has a small but appealing appearnace hear as Miss Fortini, Eilis’ boss at a deparment store.

Definitely worth seeing.

– BADMan