Butler's Cinema Scene

Saorise Ronan

“BROOKLYN”  My rating: A-

111 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Brooklyn” is a wisp of a movie packing a boatload of feeling.

In this humanistic triumph from director John Crowley, little moments add up to an intimate epic.

Based on Colm Toibin‘s novel (the terrific adaptation is by Nick Hornby), this devastatingly lovely effort follows a young woman’s journey from Ireland to America, the gradual falling away of her old identity and the new one that replaces it in the land of promise.

As the film begins Eilis (a sensational Saorise Ronan…expect an Oscar nom) is a shopgirl in small-town post-war Ireland, a place of of narrow vistas, frustrated hopes and small-minded meanness.

Despite her fierce loyalty to her mother (Jane Brennan) and spinster older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott), Eilis feels smothered and concludes her future lies elsewhere.

With the sponsorship of Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), an Irish priest living in NYC, Eilis buys a cheap boat ticket and takes off for the New World.

Her first mentor is her shipboard bunkmate,  a much more sophisticated gal who introduces Eilis to rouge and mascara, the initial step in being taken seriously as an American woman.

Once settled in the Brooklyn boarding house run by the hilariously opinionated Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), who presides over a dinner table of single girls like a tart-tongued mother hen, our heroine gets to work.

Saorise Ronan, Emory Cohen

Eilis’ days are spent clerking at a fancy department store. At night she takes accounting classes. She helps Father Flood serve holiday meals to homeless men in the local parish hall.

And she battles homesickness. Ireland may offer little future, but it’s an integral part of Eilis’ past. Just when it seems the longing for the familiar will break her, a miracle occurs.

She meets Tony (Emory Cohen), a charming, sincere and drop-dead cute Italian-American plumber who introduces her to his boisterous family, a love of the Dodgers and eventually sex (at her insistence).

Finally it’s all coming together for our girl…until bad news arrives from Ireland and Eilis returns home, only to find herself being courted by a young rich fella (Domhnall Gleeson) who previously paid her no heed. (Of course, previously she wasn’t the self-assured American girl she is now.)

“Brooklyn” is one woman’s specific  story, yet at the same time it speaks for every immigrant who has had to cope with a new life and an unfamiliar environment.

This gentle vision is brought unforgettably to life by Ronan, one of those rare actresses whose beauty is found not in drop-dead looks but from somewhere deep within.

Can a mere film capture a character’s soul? In this case, definitely. Ronan can reveal more with a sideways glance or a tentative smile than the competition can deliver with a page of dialogue and every actorish trick in the book.

“Brooklyn” is a bit thin in the production department — this is 1952 New York recreated on a budget — but that is more than made up for in emotional beauty.

Here’s a chance to fall in love with a story, a character, an actress and the country we sometimes take for granted.

| Robert W. Butler