Brooklyn, with Saoirse Ronan, explores Irish immigrant experience in US

Adapted from a Colm Toibin novel, Brooklyn follows the fate of a young Irish woman striving for a new life in America.

Saoirse Ronan

After viewing Irish director John Crowley’s Brooklyn, an adaptation of the 2009 novel by Colm Toibin, I reflected that, as a nation of immigrants, Australia has made relatively few films about the migrant experience. The broad comedy of They’re a Weird Mob (1966) was one, though I much prefer Clara Law’s Floating Life (1996), a gentle evocation of the experiences of a Chinese family that moves to an outer Sydney suburb, and Tony Ayres’s autobiographical The Home Song Stories (2007).

American films have often explored the theme of immigration as a backdrop to generational dramas, as in the Godfather trilogy, although as long ago as 1916, in The Immigrant, Charlie Chaplin made a strong political point — in his comical way — when the authorities roped together an impoverished collection of new arrivals on first sight of the Statue of Liberty. Crowley’s film deals with the Irish diaspora in America, but not in the 1880s, when Irish immigration reached its peak; this story takes place much later, in 1950.

The film revolves around the journey of Eilis Lacey, played by Irish actor Saoirse Ronan, who leaves her home town of Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, to find a new and better life in New York. Enniscorthy was Toibin’s home town, and many scenes were filmed there, lending a rare level of authenticity to the drama.

Life in this backwater is limited for a woman in her early 20s. Eilis, who doesn’t have a boyfriend, lives with Mary (Jane Brennan), her widowed mother, and Rose (Fiona Glascott), her older sister. She studies bookkeeping but, in the absence of full-time employment, works on Sundays at the grocery shop owned by the snobbish, gossipy Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), who keeps the choicest items behind the counter for her “special” customers.

The arrival in town of Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), a priest who has been living in New York, changes Eilis’s life. He encourages her to travel to America in search of a better life, and Rose backs him up, encouraging her sister and assuring her she’ll always be there to look after their mother. After agonising over her decision, Eilis courageously sets out on her own, confident that Father Flood will have found her accommodation and employment at the end of her journey. She sails from Cork and, like so many travellers at the time, experiences a terrible crossing with rough seas and wholesale seasickness, though she befriends Georgina (Eva Birthistle), who proves to be a fount of useful information, not only at sea but also during the confronting immigration process once the ship docks at Ellis Island.

Brooklyn at the beginning of the 50s (with the Korean War and “reds under the beds” going unmentioned) seems, not surprisingly, a frightening place to this shy, ill-equipped young woman. She has been allotted a room in the establishment of Ma Keogh (Julie Walters), who runs a home for single women with strict rules and regulations (no discussion of politics at mealtimes), and she has secured a job at Bartocci’s, a clothing store, where she is supervised by the imposing Miss Fortini (Jessica Pare).

Yet despite her apparent success, Eilis is desperately lonely and while the other, more sophisticated, girls at her boarding house seem to be enjoying life to the hilt, Eilis is often left alone, weeping quietly, reading letters from home, racked with homesickness. Though this is an understandable reaction, it does make you want to propel her out into the wider world we know awaits her. Father Flood persuades her to enrol in an evening class on bookkeeping, but that hardly broadens her horizons. He also persuades her to join him on Christmas Day, helping to serve free meals for the destitute, men who built the city’s tunnels and bridges and highways a few years earlier but who now live in poverty, an experience that demonstrates to her that joblessness and desperation are not confined to Ireland.

Meanwhile, the hints of lesbianism in Miss Fortini’s character (which are more than hinted at in Toibin’s novel) provide a link with Todd Haynes’s Carol. Eilis is in a similar situation to the character played by Rooney Mara in that film and both women work in clothing stores. But there is no Cate Blanchett to sweep the homesick Eilis off her feet — instead, at an Irish dance, she meets Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), a charming Italian-American, who changes everything for her. They start dating and before long he invites her home to meet his family, so she’s forced to learn how to eat spaghetti. The family, including Tony’s cute younger brother Frankie (James DiGiacomo), takes to her and when Tony invites her to the beach one day, she even buys her first swimsuit.

But, of course, there are pitfalls ahead, and bad news from Ireland compels Eilis abruptly to make the return voyage across the Atlantic, back to Enniscorthy, where everything suddenly seems as different to her as she seems to the people she knows there. She’s more sophisticated, more confident and she dresses better; she’s not the Eilis who went away to America and who couldn’t find a boyfriend. Now she finds herself courted by Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), who comes from a well-to-do family and whose intentions appear to be honourable.

And so Eilis is torn between two worlds, America and Ireland, and two lovers, Tony and Jim. In a nutshell, it’s a dilemma many immigrants have faced in the past and still face. The ties to the country where you were born and raised can be hard to break, even though your adopted country may offer so much more in almost every respect. These are themes the film explores in detail.

Toibin’s novel was adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby, a British novelist (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and screenwriter (An Education), who, while softening some of the novel’s more abrasive elements, has successfully collaborated with director Crowley in bringing these characters to the screen. Despite its title, the film works best in the Irish scenes, where the drab reality of life in this conservative country (in contrast to the colourful depiction of the place in John Ford’s contemporaneous The Quiet Man, which is referenced here) is powerfully evoked. The New York scenes were actually filmed in Montreal.

Cohen and Gleeson are well contrasted as the two men in Eilis’s life, and it’s a pleasure to see scene-stealing Walters as the acerbic landlady and Brid Brennan as the bitchy Irish shopkeeper.

Ronan’s accomplished performance provides the heart of the film, and, despite the mistakes she makes, the viewer comes to care deeply for this young woman and hope for a happy outcome to her dilemmas.

Brooklyn (M)

3.5 stars

National release from Thursday

Join Michael Bodey and David Stratton for a private preview of The Daughter followed by a Q&A with director Simon Stone and lead actors Odessa Young and Ewen Leslie. February 22, Melbourne & February 24, Sydney.