![]() She's the Old and New Worlds addled together in unpredictable ways, making her the best mascot imaginable for this lovely little film.ĭAVIES: David Edelstein is film critic for New York magazine. She's prudish but has no use for prudes, dislikes prejudice while judging relentlessly and demands obedience while half-admiring Eilis' strong will. Only one other actor pulls your gaze from her - the delightful Julie Walters as Eilis' Brooklyn by way of Ireland landlady. ![]() But given that he has her, Brooklyn plays like a dream. John Crowley directs in a gentle, undemonstrative style that might've seemed too soft with a lesser actress than Saoirse Ronan. But it's by indirection, and the good script by Nick Hornby doesn't bruise Toibin's prose by adding signposts. ![]() You can infer he thinks that leaving the old country is the right call, especially for a young woman in the 1950s. But is the obvious fit necessarily the right one? "Brooklyn" is based on a novel by Colm Toibin, who writes in his books and essays about Irishness as a kind of existential woe characterized by frail roots and a pervasive sense of loss. Jim and Eilis match up physically, in the rhythms of their speech and their frame of references. Eilis seems more self-assured and worldly than when she left, and she finds herself being wooed by Jim Farrell, the tall, well-educated heir to a successful pub, played by Domhnall Gleeson. Can this really be true love? As it happens, "Brooklyn" turns on a choice between two suitors, the second of whom she meets on a sudden return trip to Ireland. Even if the first date is a disaster, I'll give it another chance.ĮDELSTEIN: Tony is beyond adorable, but he and Eilis seem incongruous - physically, ethnically, intellectually. RONAN: (As Eilis) I'll sign up for two movies. So why are you being amenable? Can we go see a movie this week when you're not in night class? RONAN: (As Eilis) Well why would I not like it?ĬOHEN: (As Tony) You're in a good mood, huh?ĬOHEN: (As Tony) It's just - I like how you're being - I don't know the word - when you go along with everything.ĬOHEN: (As Tony) Yeah, amenable. RONAN: (As Eilis) Don't know, I've never eaten it.ĬOHEN: (As Tony) It's the best food in the world. RONAN: (As Eilis) That's it? I'd love to. Will come for dinner and meet my family sometime? You're beginning to terrify me.ĬOHEN: (As Tony) Oh, sure. SAOIRSE RONAN: (As Eilis) Please, just ask. Oh, it's nothing so bad, it's just something that most guys, they. And you're going to say, oh, it's too soon, I don't really know him well enough, we've only been out a couple times. But Eilis is finally coaxed from her shell by a compact, soft-talking dreamboat of an Italian plumber named Tony, played by Emory Cohen.ĮMORY COHEN: (As Tony) I want to ask you something. She read letters from her mother and sister and weeps hopelessly. Her housemates are snippy and judgmental, and she freezes whenever strangers engage her in small talk. But in the teeming, multicultural Brooklyn, Eilis feels like a lost soul. It's the sister who arranges with a kindly priest, played by Jim Broadbent, for Eilis to move to America, where she'll have a job behind a counter at a big department store and a room at a boarding house with young Irish ladies like herself. Her father is dead, her mother housebound, her much older sister busy with a demanding bookkeeping position and her best friend on the verge of getting engaged. It begins in the early 1950s in the village of Enniscorthy, in southeast Ireland, where the young heroine, Eilis, is unable to find a decent job. The movie is a study in homesickness, which in this case means both sick for home and sick of home. What grounds Ronan is that plainness, an acting style so free of ornamentation that you wonder how she's making you feel exactly what her character feels. She always seems like a stranger in a strange land. No wonder she's cast as ghosts and vampires and genetically-altered beings and, in "Brooklyn," a dazed immigrant. That mysticism comes from her radiant, blue-gray eyes, which register everything as if she's seeing it for the first time. ![]() Our film critic, David Edelstein, adds his own praise for the actress and the film.ĭAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: The star of the movie "Brooklyn" is the 21-year-old Irish-American actress Saoirse Ronan, who brings something unique to every role - a mixture of plainness and otherworldly beauty bordering on mysticism. Actress Saoirse Ronan was nominated for an Academy Award for the film "Atonement" and went on to starring roles in "The Lovely Bones," "Hanna" and "The Host." But it's her performance as an Irish immigrant in the new movie "Brooklyn" that's made her the toast of many critics. ![]()
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