With her timeless young/old face (shades of Grace Kelly?), minutely nuanced gestures and pitch-perfect vocal inflections, Ronan is a walking miracle, one of the most intelligent and compelling screen presences of her generation. ![]() Photograph: Kerry Brown/APĪt the centre of it all is Ronan, who hasn’t taken a false step since earning an Oscar nomination for Atonement in 2008, and who appears to have developed the ability to act with her pupils, which seem to widen and contract at will. ‘Torn between time and place’: Fiona Glascott, Jane Brennan and Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn. Wisely, Crowley allows Ó Lionáird’s voice to ring unaccompanied before Michael Brook’s orchestration appears (wonderful to hear a score that is lyrical without recourse to the ladle), a montage of silent faces offering fleeting portraits of homes left and loves lost. In one sublime sequence that echoes the poetry of the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, Eilis serves a communal Christmas dinner to the downtrodden men who “built the tunnels and bridges”, one of whom (played by angel-voiced Iarla Ó Lionáird) stands to sing the traditional Irish love song Casadh an tSúgáin. Music plays a key storytelling role, the new verses and old choruses of Eilis’s life rehearsed amid contrasting dancehall scenes. In Ireland, Eilis is a daughter with a history in America she is a woman with a future in both she is filled with displaced longing. Tapping into a rich seam of émigré cinema (Jim Sheridan’s 2002 In America is a distant cousin), Brooklyn beautifully evokes the sense of being torn between time, place and identity. For those enamoured of the heyday of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Brooklyn feels like a breath of fresh air ![]() But when weddings and funerals call her back to Ireland, Eilis’s heart starts skipping to a more familiar beat, Domhnall Gleeson’s Jim Farrell offering something of which she could only dream before leaving. Initially bereft at the separation from her sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott, excellent), Eilis finds her feet when Emory Cohen’s “decent and kind” Tony Fiorello asks her to dance, introducing her to Italian charm, cuisine and family life. This is a world of red shoes, yellow dresses, maroon and blue cars, a stark contrast to the sternly jacketed women and oily-haired blazer boys (“hardly Gary Cooper”) back home. “Sometimes it’s nice to talk to people who don’t know your auntie,” declares a fellow traveller as Ireland recedes and the New World looms. But for those enamoured of the 30s and 40s heyday of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, Brooklyn feels like a breath of fresh air.Įmpathetically adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín’s novel, this tells the story of Eilis (the immaculate Saoirse Ronan), a young woman from Enniscorthy, County Wexford who finds herself almost unwittingly “away to America” and the new horizons of the titular east coast borough. Contemporary audiences raised on overblown spectacle and overwrought romance may have to recalibrate their reactions to appreciate the rich rewards of director John Crowley’s best film since 2003’s unexpectedly punchy Intermission. The narrative may be perfectly situated in the early 50s, but the style of film-making harks back further still, to a time when “women’s pictures” were the backbone of popular cinema. W hat a moving, emotionally intelligent and refreshingly old-fashioned movie this is.
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