Brooklyn

BROOKLYN             B+        
Ireland  Canada  Great Britain  (111 mi)  2015  d:  John Crowley                Official site

She was nobody here.  It was not just that she had no friends and family.  It was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor.  Nothing meant anything.  The rooms in the house in Ireland belonged to her, she thought.  When she moved in them, she was really there.  In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the vocational school, the air, the light, the ground — it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her.  It was false, empty, she thought.  She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to.  But there was nothing, not the slightest thing.  Not even Sunday.  Nothing, maybe, except sleep. And she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep.  In any case, she could not sleep yet since it was not yet 9 o’clock.  There was nothing she could do.  It was as though she had been locked away.

—Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín, 2009

Despite its grand ambitions, this is a small, intimate film that places its faith on the intricacies of language, suggesting a time when words had more meaning and the world was perceived as flush with new opportunities.  Adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín’s acclaimed 2009 Irish novel, it’s largely an old-fashioned immigrant tale from the early 50’s about decent people attempting to find their way in the new world, told in a social realist style that may hold greater appeal to an educated class, as it’s intelligent and extremely well-written, using a literary style where the exact choice of words, like “amenable,” is exquisite.  Seen through the eyes of a central character, Saoirse Ronan is Eilis Lacey, a young girl just out of high school growing up in a suffocatingly barren town of Enniscorthy in Wexford County on the southeastern coast of Ireland, a town described by James Joyce in Ulysses as “the finest place in the world,” but to Eilis, living with her more likeable and employed sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and her constantly depressed widowed mother (Jane Brennan), nothing ever seems to happen there, where it has come to represent the sheer ordinariness of provincial life, where just about the only thing to do is go swimming on Sunday afternoons at the beach just over the nearby cliff.  It is also the town where author Colm Tóibín comes from, while Ronan’s parents grew up in neighboring County Carlow.  Initially Eilis is seen as a relatively unexciting character, shy and annoyingly drab, where her passivity makes her difficult to identify with, working weekends at a small shop run by a spiteful old woman Miss Kelly (Bríd Brennan) that hoards every penny she makes, treating her customers like herded cattle, reproaching them when lines develop that they could have shopped earlier in the week.  It’s a dreary and dismal existence, with no real hopes for the future until Rose arranges for Eilis to travel to America, where a job and a place to stay have already been found through an Irish priest in Brooklyn, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent).  Leave it to Miss Kelly to make Eilis feel guilty about leaving, suggesting Rose will be forced to care for their mother for the rest of her life.  Like a bird forced to leave the nest, Eilis is totally unprepared for her worldly adventure, finding herself seasick for most of the voyage on the ship, literally rescued by a fellow traveler (Eva Birthistle) who teaches her how to survive a transatlantic crossing intact, even offering tips for navigating her way through customs.

The story is about a persistent longing, where coming to America is “not” the most natural thing in the world, but a huge obstacle to overcome, particularly when the struggle is made alone.  While working as a sales girl in an upscale department store, Eilis does not exhibit a flair for the job, where making small talk with the customers does not come easy for her, as she’s literally overcome by loneliness and being homesick, where letters from Rose leave her sobbing in tears for what she’s left behind, where she can’t help but dream of the days she spent back home with her family.  She lives in an Irish boarding house run by the acid-tongued Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), a strict and opinionated lady who is always quick to point out certain topics are inappropriate for the dinner table, shared with a group of frivolous young girls who spend their days either working or gossiping about their new housemate who is viewed as overly naïve and even saintly, especially as she’s willing to help out Father Flood at the Catholic mission feeding the smelly, destitute old men Christmas dinner, where he informs her these are the men who have literally built the roads and bridges and most of the buildings in Brooklyn.  There’s an especially poignant moment when one of them sings an anguished Irish lament in Gaelic about the misfortunes of love, “Casadh An tSúgáin” (A Twist of the Rope), Casadh an tSugain - Micheal 0'Domhnaill and Bothy Band 1979 YouTube (4:55).  The benevolence of Father Flood reaches unprecedented heights, seen as an antidote for Spotlight (2015), where Jim Broadbent’s Catholic priest is one of the most positive uses of a priest in recent memory, informing Eilis that the church would pay tuition for evening classes in bookkeeping, which will lead to a better paying position.  One does not often think of the Catholic Church as having engaged in career counseling, but they are in fact a transatlantic employment agency for an entire network of new Irish immigrants, where the church is the common denominator on both shores.   It’s fitting, then, that Eilis meets her love interest at a weekend Irish dance with no alcohol served sponsored by the church, where Tony, Emory Cohen from Beneath the Harvest Sky (2013), is an Italian plumber who can’t take his eyes off her, establishing a pattern of regular dates, picking her up after school and walking her home, where it all seems innocent enough, apparently modeled after On the Waterfront (1954) where Marlon Brando’s barely literate dockworker develops a crush on the more properly educated Eva Marie Saint.  While she’s slow to reciprocate affection, it’s easy to tell the remarkable influence he has on her life, as she soon oozes confidence and a newfound maturity. 

It’s interesting that when the idea of intermarriage comes up, it’s not about black and white, but Italian and Irish.  Eilis gets a refresher course from her roommates on how to properly eat pasta without splashing the sauce, so when she finally meets Tony’s family for dinner, the event is dominated by Tony’s wisecracking younger 8-year old brother Frankie (James DiGiacomo) who hilariously mouths off to their polite guest about how much the Italians hate the Irish, which immediately endears him to the audience.  Much like Miss Kelly and Mrs. Kehoe, these bristling comments from secondary characters are like a breath of fresh air, adding caustic humor and a certain charm to the language heard throughout, elevating the material through powerfully understated performances.  When a visit from Father Flood informs Eilis that her sister Rose has mysteriously died from an undisclosed heart ailment, Eilis breaks from the mold of most Irish immigrants and actually returns to Ireland, already transformed by her personal experiences, where she’s become someone to envy and admire, as guys that previously ignored her are now noticeably interested.  She’s a bit baffled by her newly discovered popularity, as people want to hear about her experiences in America, but mostly urge her to stay in Ireland, where she’s even offered Rose’s old job.  While she intended the trip to be short, she couldn’t possibly anticipate the hold that Ireland would have on her, where she’s pursued by Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), a sensitive, traditional-minded guy who stands to inherit his family’s fortune, a guy that notices things about her that Tony doesn’t see, where she grows comfortable with the idea of this being her real home.  While Tony’s letters go unanswered, Eilis is utterly bewildered by it all, where she’s somehow become the center of attention, where the open expanse of the beach never looked more beautiful, without all the clutter and crowded humanity of Coney Island.  She could conceivably lead a perfectly happy life here after all, where she could look after her mother, or she could build a new life in America, where the seeds of promise have been planted, but have yet to take root.  Either way, she has to let something go, where the heartache and growing pains expressed are unmistakably real, where Ronan’s subtle and particularly nuanced performance draws the audience into her internal conflict, where what initially seemed so drab and starkly empty when she left has suddenly evolved into new possibilities.  What’s unique is watching Eilis blossom from a child into an extraordinary woman right before our eyes, delving into submerged emotions, where the beauty is getting caught up in the lives of multiple characters onscreen, where the emotional devastation is felt across the board throughout both countries, ultimately becoming a heartbreaking experience, an intriguing coming-of-age story on an international scale filled with romantic implications.  And while it’s distinctly Irish with Catholic undertones, plagued by feelings of loneliness and guilt, in a bigger sense it’s about the ideas of rebirth and resurrection, where all who pass through Ellis Island chase a dream of making something out of nothing, where there’s no turning back.  It’s an extraordinary portrait of exile, shown with deliberate restraint, revealing how the effects of leaving home and establishing a new life are never easy, where you’re literally torn between two worlds, as a part of you must end in order to advance to the next phase, like leaving your childhood behind to discover a young adult. 

Beneath the Harvest Sky

BENEATH THE HARVEST SKY            B+ 

USA  (116 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly         Official site

Good people make bad choices.            —Casper (Emory Cohen)

Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly worked together for five years following the lives of three senior citizens who spent years greeting nearly one million returning U.S. troops when they arrive at the tiny Bangor, Maine airport in the documentary THE WAY WE GET BY (2009) before finally getting married in a wedding profiled in The New York Times Vows Section.  Their documentary film experience clearly effects the meticulous detail expressed in this film taking place entirely in the small border town of Van Buren, Maine, becoming a portrait of the hardscrabble life in the bleak and economically deprived town where the French-Canadian accents are built into the everyday language.  Infused with the best traditions of the American indie film style, which are often hampered by monetary restrictions, they make up for it in the authenticity of the experience, where the film offers a genuine view of what it’s like to grow up in the world of rural poverty, as afterwards the audience is likely to feel a familiarity with this tiny rural town with a population of less than 2000 inhabitants, as if we’ve been there, where there’s a comically derogatory reference to the movie FROZEN RIVER (2008), which covers similar territory.  The film immediately captures one’s attention by a scene in a high school classroom where they are studying S.E. Hinton’s 1967 teen novel The Outsiders, a novel published when the author herself was only 18, a realistic portrayal of poor teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks featuring the likes of characters named Sodapop and Ponyboy, who may as well be the leads in this film, featuring two fiercely loyal high school friends that couldn’t be more devoted to one another, Casper (Emory Cohen) and Dominic (Callan McAuliffe).  While Dominic is spending the summer helping out his parents with the potato harvest, he’s a smart kid with a bright future, but he continually gets drawn into the troubled affairs of Casper, a hothead Alpha male that plays by his own rules, thinking he’s infallible, making him a bit of a small-time hood with ambitions to get out of town, where their shared dream is to move to Boston (seemingly a million miles away) where they can watch Red Sox games.  

At the urging of others to stay away from Casper, as he’s always up to no good, Dominic is forced to constantly defend his friend, claiming others just don’t understand, yet their friendship feels reminiscent of the Biblical Cain and Abel saga, paralleled by two other brothers in the film.  The film is seen through the eyes of Casper, who is mostly a despicable character, someone we’ve all encountered at one point or another in our lives, the kind of guy destined for the penitentiary or death by the age of 25, as the only decisions he knows how to make are the wrong ones, where he makes a living glorifying the persona of being rebellious, almost always seen on the wrong side of the law.  We see him break into people’s homes and steal their prescription medicine, making him part of an underground, pharmaceutical black market network that transports pills across the border to New Brunswick, a business that’s been in his family for generations, where they pride themselves in being able to move contraband without detection.  Casper has a 15-year old girlfriend Tasha (Zoe Levin) who quickly becomes pregnant, where the adolescent tension is only aggravated by the fact that he orders her around, continually berates and belittles her, while both continue to live with their parents.  The feeling of being trapped is at the heart of the picture, as essentially every character plays into this dead-end scenario, with the potato harvest as the only thriving business in town, where there’s just no future for these kids unless they can get out.  Illustrating this point is Dominic’s short term relationship with Emma (Sarah Sutherland, aka Kiefer Sutherland’s daughter), a girl that’s already visited prospective colleges in Vermont, where she’ll soon be moving on, making their relationship tenuous at best.  The looseness of the film’s structure is part of its appeal, as it’s a highly impressionistic, stream-of-conscious mosaic connected by the raw and achingly lonely songs from musician Dustin Hamman, the front man of the group Run On Sentence, moving from unpretentious moments of raucous street euphoria to the saddest and darkest feelings of despair (the musical soundtrack can be heard in its entirety here: pre-order). 

While the film is told out of time, it has a tendency to get lost exploring its many jagged side plots, often growing messy and losing narrative coherence, which may detract some viewers, but what it does beautifully establish is more local flavor into the film, where the town itself may as well be the lead character, expressed through a series of vignettes showing a farm community at work, populated entirely by secondary roles that tend to come and go, or move in and out of view, where we might even see a drunken late-night moose chase on the highway or a rather incredible performance by a heavy metal punk band that suddenly appears out of nowhere.  Only Casper is a fully developed character, but as he’s such a mischievous and thoroughly detestable soul, treating everyone around him like shit, thinking he’s above it all and impervious to criticism, where the glorification of his character, flaws and all, is a difficult and often unpleasant journey, especially when he remains at the centerpiece of the film.  He’s obviously a bright, if misguided kid, with few options, where he has a tendency to continually get ahead of himself, to act before he thinks, where he never foresees the murky trouble that lies ahead, mirroring the adults around him, thinking instead that none of the dirt and muck will stick to him.  As he gets deeper into his estranged father’s (Aiden Gillen) business, Dominic calls him on it, claiming he’s become an errand boy for his father, which is exactly what everyone in town expected from him as he was growing up, where only Dominic had faith that he’d make more out of himself and become something different.  This disappointment leads to a personal tragedy that resembles a similar fate of Ponyboy’s best friend Johnny in The Outsiders, a heartbreaking moment that draws attention to the significance of these young lives, each so terribly fragile, with dreams dissipating into thin air after high school when few opportunities await them due to the economic bleakness that pervades the vicinity.  Written, directed, edited, and produced by this artistic team, it has a distinctively autobiographical, though male-tinged flavor, where the filmmakers lure in the viewer, with both inhabiting the same shared space for a brief duration of time.  Like Shunji Iwai’s ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (2001), another teenage angst film filled with brooding high school characters that get lost in an overpowering stylization, this is irrefutably impressive filmmaking, where the indie-style cinematography by Stephen Capitano Calitri is nothing less than mesmerizing at times, but there is a disconnect with so many of the people that inhabit this film, which may be the point, as the audience is left with an anguishing emptiness that literally stirs the soul in this barebones musical coda that brings down the closing credits, Run On Sentence "Wide Open Sky" YouTube (5:03).