"Brooklyn"

At first it all seems a little too pretty and idyllic to be true. An almost note-perfect immigration fairy tale, in which a brave young heroine overcomes homesickness and culture shock to become a hard-working citizen, meets a charming man from a different background and cements her integration into the American melting-pot by marrying him. An optimistic, rose-tinted vision of the American dream whose coincidence with the nativist reawakening spearheaded by Donald Trump is bound to cause discomfort, all the more considering the heroine in question – like most 1950s immigrants – is a white European.

Like so many people, it is ostensibly the opportunity for a better job that draws Ellis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) to the USA. But the film’s opening scenes, set during her last days in Ireland before her departure, point to another, more difficultly articulated reason: It’s not just her employer’s snide condescension towards customers and workers alike; it’s not just her open disdain for the local greasy-haired, blazer-wearing rugby players that pass for town hunks. As read in the lines of Ronan’s soft, pudic face, what’s eating Ellis more than anything is displacement. Even in a free, peaceful and relatively prosperous country she has known all her life, she still doesn’t feel quite at home.

So simple and obvious are these conflicting emotions behind the film’s theme of belonging that they almost slip past the viewer’s attention, registering for a flicker of a second before dissipating into the aether. Although Ellis does go through the hostility, confusion and dizzying feeling of disorientation so common to the human migratory experience, Nick Hornby’s screenplay – based on a novel by Colm Tóibín – softens these hardships by reducing them to a series of simple puzzles to solve: how to gain access to the toilet on the ferry, how to entertain customers with small talk, how to eat spaghetti when meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Assimilation is turned into a competitive game whose rules are fully in line with the individualist ethic at the soul of American capitalism.

Accordingly, John Crowley’s direction follows a classical tradition that sometimes threatens to veer into the kind of Anglo-Saxon academicism that has been developed and perfected on British screens for the past decade. It’s especially noticeable in the recurring dinner scenes involving Ellis’s comically crusty conservative landlady Mrs. Keogh (Julie Walters) and her fellow tenants: Close shots of Walters are invariably followed by reverse shots of either Ellis or her catty mentors in American femininity Patty and Diana, with the occasional long frontal shot showing them at the table. He finds more inspiration in the romance between Ellis and Italian-American working class heartthrob Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), which blooms in slow tracking-out shots that gently guide them from home to home. A beach outing on Coney Island, during which the colour variety of both clothes and skintones¹ leap out with the vibrancy and freshness of contemporary home movies, is a particular highpoint.

Yet even in those tender moments, anchored so pertinently into the time period’s zeitgeist by Cohen’s matinee idol appeal, Crowley and Hornby keep the emotional dangers and mysteries of young cross-cultural love to a minimum: A premature “I love you” blurted out by Tony after a successful meet-the-parents dinner is as close to discomfort as they are willing to take us. Ethnic divisions are briefly alluded to during said dinner when Tony’s annoyingly precocious little brother remarks on anti-Italian police brutality committed by Irish-American cops, but it’s treated as little more than a humorous temporary derailment – one that ironically improves Ellis’s rapport with the family instead of complicating it.

As the unexpected death of Ellis’s younger sister Rose transports the narrative back to Ireland for the final act, all the emotions Crowley and Hornby have been dulling and diverting for the past hour or so come creeping back in to hit the audience from behind. Slowly, the idyllic worldview conveyed by their past choices takes on an unexpectedly poignant new meaning, as the town and people that had previously seemed so alien to Ellis become anchors to an identity she never truly knew she had until she left. Her growing attraction to wealthy but colourless Jim Farrell (Domnhall Gleeson) provides suspense for the third act’s dramatic mechanisms, but above all it gives Crowley and Ronan the chance to underscore the fleeting, distant nature of their heroine’s goals and desires.

It’s a pity then that these openings into a world of strange, rarely-examined impulses and feelings have to be closed so quickly in order to grant the audience its happy ending. Through the Nolan-like parallel cross-cutting of Ellis’s reunion with Tony and her mentorship of a new fellow Irish immigrant, every psychosocial loose end is tied up, leaving only the lingering effects of the emotional time bomb whose quiet detonation defined the last half-hour.

At a time when ethno-cultural tribalism and knee-jerk identity politics have thoroughly undermined the mythology surrounding immigration to the U. S., Brooklyn’s outlook initially comes across as a quaint anachronism. The fact that this apparent idealism is eventually revealed as a conduit for more complex ideas may not entirely justify Crowley and Hornby’s occasional shortcut or cop-out, but it does elevate their film above the middlebrow crowd-pleasers it so closely resembles. As relevant as it is old-fashioned, Brooklyn is at its best when its contradictions echo those within its protagonist’s heart.

¹Credit must be given to Crowley and his director of photography Yves Bélanger for trying to subvert their story’s inescapable whiteness by blocking and composing crowded shots with strategically placed black extras.