Brooklyn

The narrative is slight, but the two central performances are beautifully detailed portraits of young love. Brooklyn is charming, if overly sentimental, eschewing the more dramatically potent stuff in favor of a fluffy romance. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact, it’s very sweet and entertaining, but lurking around the corners of the frame is a better film wanting to break free.

The immigrant experience is a well-used story by this point, and, if done correctly, can provide an emotional cathartic experience. Brooklyn tells the story of an ordinary Irish girl, who is sent to America through the machinations of her older sister and a kindly priest, finds herself lost and adrift until she meets a nice Italian boy. That’s about it. It’s thin stuff, and it had the potential for something greater.

The dramatic stakes are incredibly low here. For a long time Brooklyn flirts with presenting the loneliness, isolation, depression, and culture shock that Eilis feels in her first year in America, but it never goes deep into these emotions. They’re all surface mechanics, and a third act return to Ireland has an accelerated parallel structure in which she meets a nice Irish boy, gets a job, and realizes that there’s nothing for her here anymore.

Anything worth celebrating in Brooklyn, and there are several things of note, comes primarily from the cast. The entire film rests upon Saoirse Ronan’s performance, and she delivers the goods. She holds the screen in several moments of quiet contemplation, searing with emotional intensity, or flirtatious humor, or sweetness. Ronan was the most captivating performer in Atonement, and it’s good to see her delivering another performance of such emotional commitment and deep excavation.

Meeting her level of excellence is Emory Cohen, as the nice Italian boyfriend she meets in America. Cohen’s all soulful stares and sexy smirks, embodying the boyfriend of my dreams, essentially. Once she goes back to Ireland and falls into a romance with Domhnall Gleeson, charming as he may be, it’s hard to imagine why Eilis wouldn’t run back to Brooklyn as soon as possible to be back into the supportive arms and adoring gaze of Cohen.

All of the other supporting players are thinly written sketches, but Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent do their best to give them some fiery life. Walters, in particular, manages to make her mother hen into something entertaining, while Broadbent is fine, but sacked with a kindly priest taking on a paternal figure in Eilis’ life. We’ve seen these types many times before, but these actors are so good at their craft they do wonders to make them feel like real(ish) people.

It may sound like I didn’t enjoy Brooklyn as much as I did, but I just found some of it slightly frustrating. But it’s a very lovely film, with two lead characters that are likable and believable in their attraction and desires, and beautifully acted from top-to-bottom. I suppose hearing that the film was the story of an immigrant in New York gave me impressions of where the film would go, and the film drifts towards those locations, but pulls back. No matter, Brooklyn is one fine piece of romantic movie-making.