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.
Butler's Cinema Scene 