Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! We're heading back to the mid-20-teens....
And from there back to the early 1950s for John Crowley's romantic period drama Brooklyn, about an Irish immigrant starting a new life in America. Saoirse Ronan stars as Eilis Lacey, a young woman with a go-nowhere job at a local grocery store in a small Irish town. Eilis lives with her mother and sister and has basically no prospects, professional or romantic. A priest who has already emigrated to New York sponsors Eilis's relocation and sets her up at a boarding house, arranges a department store job, and also enrolls her in night classes to learn accounting. She meets an Italian-American boy named Tony and they immediately hit it off. Everything is going well for Eilis in America, but a sudden family issue summons her back to Ireland, where her mother and friends and a well-to-do neighborhood fella named Jim Farrell all pressure her to stay, leaving her torn between her successful new life and her Irish roots.
This is a pretty delightful film, with a surprising balance of drama and humor, the latter of which is largely supplied by boarding house dinner table scenes with Mrs. Kehoe the landlady (a drolly entertaining Julie Walters), and also by Tony's precocious young brother Frankie (James DiGiacomo). The romantic moments are kept light on their feet so as not to veer into Nicholas Sparks-esque melodrama. At certain points I was expecting Eilis and Tony's relationship to take a hackneyed detour to create tension, or dreading her making a life decision against her interests, but the film avoids these pitfalls that would've derailed it. And of course the luminous Saoirse Ronan carries the film beautifully, as she did in Lady Bird, imbuing Eilis with a blend of likable innocence and pragmatic realism. I have yet to see a performance by Ronan where I found her less than captivating, and Eilis is a character I could spend all day with.
Aside from some not-quite-convincing CG imagery, mostly during Eilis's boat trip across the Atlantic, the film does a fine job of capturing the early 50s period, making me want to explore that iteration of New York. There's an old-timey simplicity in the NYC skyline and in the depiction of shops and restaurants, before everything became so corporate and sanitized. This film's version of NYC feels like a place where hope still exists, where good, honest hard work will always pay off. For a clever young woman like Eilis, The American Dream is very much within reach.
I give Brooklyn ***1/2 out of ****.
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