Brooklyn

Brighter days await Eilis (Saoirse Ronan, Lost River), or so she’s told. Despite growing up in rural Ireland in 1950s, she is bound for Brooklyn, with her older sister Rose (Fiona Glascott, TV’s Episodes) arranging her voyage with kindly, US-based priest Father Flood (Jim Broadbent, Paddington). A life full of possibilities beckons; however leaving her family, including her widowed mother (Jane Brennan, Death of a Superhero), conjures mixed emotions. Upon her arrival, she stays in Mrs Kehoe’s (Julie Walters, One Chance) boarding house, works in a department store, studies to become a book-keeper and meets Italian-American plumber Tony (Emory Cohen, The Gambler), but the lure of home — and a bond with Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson, Ex Machina), when she does return — is hard to shake.

In fact, there’s a look that rarely leaves Eilis — and that’s where the bulk of Brooklyn resides, tonally, in telling her tale. Her gaze, whether landing upon the small town she’s departing from, roving over the sea she travels over or staring up at the big city that greets her, never completely casts aside her sadness nor hides her reluctant hope. Her countenance is bittersweet as both sorrow and excitement course through her veins, filter through her eyes and infect the entire film. Accordingly, Brooklyn charts her attempt to reconcile the promise and pleasure her fresh start eventually evokes with the nostalgia and pain of moving on from her home and her past, and is defined by the clash of her opposing feelings.

Crafting a movie that finds that fragile balance in routine circumstances, that understands the tensions that spring from conflicting sentiments, and that acknowledges that falling somewhere between two states is a more common reality than adhering to extremes, is no easy feat. In adapting Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel of the same, director John Crowley (Closed Circuit) and writer Nick Hornby (Wild) tread delicately but commandingly through complicated territory. That their efforts pull at the heartstrings yet never come across as manipulative speaks to the subtlety and sincerity with which they fulfil their task; though drastic moves and grand gestures feature in the plot, as does the joy of love and the agony of loss, Brooklyn is more concerned with the complexity that lingers, day-to-day, behind the big moments and sweeping feelings. 

Gifting the film much more than her quietly expressive face, Ronan is crucial to the movie’s successful burrowing beyond a broad narrative, delving beneath the surface of immigration and romance, and unearthing of a slice of keenly observed intimacy. She’s the wavering centre of a storm that rages in every graceful but tentative step, her performance one of intricate, sensitive physicality in casting the inner workings of Eilis onto a cinematic canvas. Her co-stars Cohen and Gleeson provide no less textured portrayals, one earnest and enthusiastic, the other more restrained and reserved, but both conveying — and showing rather than telling — the waves of happiness and anxiety Tony and Jim’s affection for the feature’s heroine unleashes. The fondness for action over words that seethes through their efforts mirrors the movie itself; when competing forces stir, swirl and swell, talk can only echo so far, meaning that it’s what a person does rather than says that matters.

Crowley and his technical team ensure Brooklyn provides more with its sights than its sounds, though Michael Brook’s (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) wistful score offers a fine accompaniment to finessed visuals. As a result, the three key actors find themselves wrapped up in Yves Bélanger’s (Dallas Buyers Club) lovingly lensed cinematography and François Séguin’s (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones) period-appropriate production design, all players in a handsome painting of light, mood and movement. And, in a movie that longingly lingers between several choices — be they then and now, the UK and the US, or Tony and Jim — they’re also left to navigate contrasting spaces, with Ireland and America both awash in their own respective hues. Brooklyn splices the two together, patiently and poignantly, just as it intertwines the emotions they represent, leaving a beautifully moving portrait placed where it should be: warmly, winningly in the middle. 

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Brooklyn
Director: John Crowley
Ireland / UK / Canada, 2015, 111 mins

British Film Festival
www.britishfilmfestival.com.au
Sydney: 27 October – 18 November
Melbourne: 28 October – 18 November
Adelaide: 28 October – 18 November
Perth: 28 October – 18 November
Canberra: 29 October – 18 November
Brisbane: 29 October – 18 November
Byron Bay: 29 October – 18 November

In general release: 11 February 2016
Distributor: Transmission
Rating: TBC