Brooklyn so completely transports its audience into another time and place that we feel a rapturous catharsis with a young woman who discovers herself and, more importantly, achieves what she wants for her own life. It's a beautiful excursion, with detail and culture oozing out of every surface, intent on realizing the journey of an Irish immigrant in the middle of the last century. And realize it it does, though perhaps in less effective ways than some of us might have preferred.
First things first. Bravo to yet another strong woman-led drama this year, showing us (as Carol did) exactly how to properly center a movie around a woman with real emotions, real strength, and who faces real issues. Also like Carol, this film's production design is transcendent, intricate, and detailed in the best possible ways, given a perfect amount of attention so that it neither distracts from the story nor lies ignored in the background.
Saoirse Ronan is dazzling as the lead woman, Eilis, who leaves her home in Ireland to find a new life in America. We see her grow from a frightened girl to a confident and autonomous woman, and Ronan's nuances and subtlety is a marvel to witness. She is never less than pure, a performance that is always vulnerable, raw, and honest, so much so that in our age of dark and duplicitous antiheroes, she reads almost like a heroine from a bygone age of children's fairytales. Emory Cohen matches her almost perfectly, and his slight Italian inflection casts as romantic a spell on the viewer as it does Ronan's character. No other performances in the film really matter, though most are fairly solid, and the couple of scenes with Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters steal the movie away. Domhnall Gleeson shows up near the end as a pathetic excuse for a dangerous plot device, but thankfully his poor presence is short-lived and ineffectual.
I've made a few references liking Brooklyn to the other big romantic drama this season, but unlike Carol, this film has little in the way of intrigue. In fact, I was distinctly disappointed as I left the theater because I felt as though I had just sat through a glorified Hallmark special. A sort of high-caliber, polished-for-awards-season sticky-sweet romantic melodrama with no complexities, no novelties, and no reason to remember it after the fact. The story is rote, the characters broad (except our lead), and we've seen the period before. I'm not really sure, then, why this film was necessary, nor why it has received the acclaim it has. I can't deny the aesthetic power of the film, and frankly its unrelenting optimism and hope is infectious (and distinctly rare in dramas, to my knowledge), but I found the script to be weak, the performances both hit and miss, and the themes to be so watered down that every time Brooklyn tried too hard to pull at my heartstrings, I slapped it back with a guffaw and waited for it to get smart. It didn't.
IMDb: Brooklyn
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