Brooklyn – directed by John Crowley. Drama. 112 minutes Color 2016.
★★★★★
The Story: A simple Irish girl is given the chance to move to America and makes the most of it.
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Although she resembles John Cusack, Saoirse Ronan, the young actress reminds me, in her strength and female sparkle, of the teenage Elizabeth Taylor. I see the same beauty in them both.
She plays a young Irish girl who longs for a life better and other than the one arrayed before her in her native village. With the help of a Catholic priest in Brooklyn she transports to the new world. There she finds herself homesick, but presently acclimates herself to Brooklyn and the lives of those about her. She finds them attractive and alive, and she begins to better herself with night classes.
Circumstances, however, draw her back to Ireland, and this is the important part of the story for us, the viewers – the need one day to go back to ones roots for whatever reason – to settle matters, to get love right, to take measure – and this one must do in person.
I’m not going to tell you anything more about the story but that. For as she does this, we do it with her on our own account. So the movie has the force of myth, entering the house of death with all its lures and coming back out of it alive.
Ronan is just right for the role; she gives just enough that we may give our share too. She is up for the Oscar for the best performance, and her victory would grace the honor.
Two ringers appear in the film with her, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, both of whom are actors who wear their comic apparel as though they had lived in it for ages. Broadbent plays the kindly priest who sponsored her, and Walters plays the harpy landlady of the women’s boarding house where she lodges. And a lovely young actor plays her beau in Brooklyn, Emory Cohen; his every move endears you to him. You understand his courtship as necessary to his intentions. You understand his attraction to Irish girls, his valentine to her as a physical dance.
The period would be in the early ‘50s, and the costumer and production designer and director have caught it all just right.
All this is in addition to Saoirse Ronan’s performance as Eilis Lacey whom you dote on and travel with and become.