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A love story is a tricky thing, because there are a lot of expectations. Even subverting the common tropes is already cliché by this point, so instead it’s often better to wrap the romance in something else. Connection with the audience or real world themes like class or immigration is a good place to start, but the real trick is to have characters you actually care about. That’s a tough thing, and it’s a rare thing to get right. Sometimes you get pretty close though.
Brooklyn (from the novel of the same name) stars Saoirse Ronan as Eris Lacey, a young woman living in Ireland in the early 1950’s. Eris is a hard worker at her low paying job, but it doesn’t seem all that fulfilling or with any real potential for the future. So with the help of her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott), Eris takes a trip to the titular Brooklyn in the US, living in a primarily Irish immigrant community.
For a while, it’s not really about serious conflicts, but mostly internal ones. Eris must learn to adjust to a new way of doing things, a different sort of job working with loud and brazen New York customers at a department store, and handle her deep, nearly crippling homesickness. Slowly she begins to get past these problems and even meets someone: Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), a classic Italian boy with a thing for Irish girls.
Their slowly developing romance is a thing of care in this movie, because it would be so easy to lose interest. There’s a bit of an issue here. Saoirse Ronan is fantastic here, vulnerable but capable, with a sense of purpose and strength that you easily buy into her arc of growth and love. Emory Cohen though isn’t quite so believable in the mid-century time period, and his performance just wasn’t as interesting or engaging as Saoirse’s. He’s not annoying but sometimes his character comes off a bit clichéd.
I mean, as I recall, in the classic cartoon An American Tail, I believe Feivel the Mouse’s friend, Tony the Italian mouse, has a bit of a romance with an Irish lady mouse. But I suppose another story about the immigrant experience is still relevant even today, perhaps especially today, considering the controversies about walls on the Mexican border or vituperative bans against Muslim immigrants.
Eris soon faces legitimate conflict, and just like any romance movie, faces confusion and trouble. Will she break the rules of her overbearing but complimentary landlady (Julie Walters)? Will the words from a priest she knew back in Ireland (Jim Broadbent, killer as always) help her to succeed or make her stumble? Due to a problem, she must decide between staying and going more than once.
The movie puts forth an idea about the point of tradition versus the changes forced on immigrants for them to succeed. Eris faced nothing but a life of drudgery in Ireland, but it still was her home and her roots. To uproot and go somewhere else, somewhere totally new, is hard and requires excessive amounts of bravery and courage. In this movie, a few things completely worked for me.
For one, the movie looks beautiful, giving a clear sense of the time and place in history. From the banks of Ireland to the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, it all seems sincere and real. The romance, although a bit clichéd at times, connects and works slowly so that you legitimately care about how it all ends. It’s a subtle movie, not beating you over the head with its messages. For example, it shows the beauty of Ireland and the US, but doesn’t fail to show the potential problems either.
Of course, I’ve already praised the work of Saoirse Ronan, whose performance was easily in the top five actresses of 2015 for me. While Emory Cohen may not have been anything close to as good as her, he was a worthy enough partner for her. The language, now that I think of it, was also quite excellent, plain as it needed to be, but filled with bits of beauty. And it sounded authentic, another great trick.
So this was a love story wrapped in a tale about the immigrant’s struggle for success, which is a bit of a bigger idea than I thought it was when sitting down to watch it. The movie may not win the big prizes this year, but keep your eye out for Saoirse — she’s won a few awards already and she may just win the big one.
Brooklyn has a run time of 1 hours 57 minutes and is rated rated PG-13 for a scene of sexuality and brief strong language.
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