John Crowley (2015)
The heroine of Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey, emigrates to America, from Enniscorthy, the County Wexford town where she was born and raised. The year is 1952. Eilis gets a job as a shopgirl in a New York department store. In Brooklyn, where she lodges in an Irish boarding house and takes night school classes in accountancy, she also starts dating Tony Fiorello, a native of the borough. It was Eilis’s sister, Rose, who arranged for her younger sibling to emigrate in the hope of finding a better job and life across the Atlantic. When Rose dies suddenly, Eilis prepares to return temporarily to Ireland. Tony persuades Eilis to marry him before she sails. Back in Enniscorthy, Eilis keeps her marriage a secret from her widowed mother; it’s immediately clear that Mrs Lacey, whatever she says to the contrary, expects Eilis to stay with her indefinitely. At first, Eilis is determined to resist this pressure and the attempts made to fix her up with a suitable young man – Jim Farrell, the son of a well-off local family. A few weeks later, she is having second thoughts. Tony’s feelings for Eilis were always more evidently enthusiastic than hers for him. Letters from Tony arrive regularly in Ireland but Eilis replies seldom; after a while, she puts the letters, unopened, in a drawer. She’s increasingly drawn to Jim. Before she emigrated, Eilis worked in the Enniscorthy shop run by Miss Kelly. This noxious old biddy, who now asks to see Eilis again, has discovered from a relative in New York that Eilis is married. Shocked and appalled by this minatory reminder of the small-town mentality she was once happy to leave behind, Eilis tells her mother about Tony and books passage to return to America without further ado. She leaves a note for Jim Farrell, without seeing him again.
John Crowley’s screen adaptation of Colm Tóibin’s fine novel, published in 2009, is quiet, careful and sensitive. Nick Hornby’s skilful screenplay is largely faithful to the original in both tone and storyline but he and Crowley add an important postscript. We see Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) on her second sea voyage to America and back in New York, and the moment of her reunion there with Tony (Emory Cohen). The closing shots of their embrace, accompanied by Eilis’s reflective words in voiceover, are far from fatuously feelgood but they’re less downbeat than the book’s ending, and I was grateful for that. My recollection is that I was absorbed by and admired Tóibin’s Brooklyn but found it painfully sad: Eilis has to leave Tony just when things are going well with him in New York; she then has to leave Ireland again just as she’s starting to enjoy life, and the prospect of a future with Jim, there. Because Saiorse Ronan is so appealing as Eilis, the film, had it ended exactly as the book does, would have been even sadder than the novel. Although the story has a specific socio-historical setting, the theme of home in Brooklyn is larger than that context, and multivalent. Eilis is seasick on the voyage to America and homesick for some time after she arrives in New York. As part of a large Irish community there, Eilis could experience Brooklyn as a home from home. Tony is nonetheless apprehensive about the strength of her attachment to Enniscorthy: ‘it’s home’, he says, and he knows, as part of a happy Italian-American family, what home means to him. On her return to Ireland, Eilis does some book-keeping for the firm that employed Rose; the manager would be happy for Eilis to work there permanently. Once she’s enjoying spending time with Jim, she says she wishes that living at home ‘had been like this before Rose died’. Yet Saoirse Ronan is able to suggest that Eilis, in saying this, knows that, for various reasons, it couldn’t have been ‘like this’ if she hadn’t been away in the meantime.
This isn’t easy material to bring to the screen. Brooklyn has at its centre a protagonist who’s a sensible, often reserved girl – and someone with mixed and changing feelings. Some of the supporting characters are unusually ambiguous. The story recognises that settling for second best is both disappointing and may be a cause for gratitude. All in all, there’s a risk that audiences will find the film poky and indefinite but I liked it very much. The dance-hall rituals of small-town Ireland and Brooklyn are gently but sharply observed; the routines and hierarchies within Madge Kehoe’s boarding house are splendidly realised by John Crowley – so is Eilis’s first visit to Tony’s family for dinner. Crowley might have made Brooklyn even stronger by varying the pace more but his orchestration of the cast is just about impeccable. Because it’s eight years since she broke through in Atonement, it’s easy to think of Saiorse Ronan as a veteran but she’s still only twenty-one. As Eilis, she delivers a performance that, as well as being affecting, is remarkably mature in its subtlety and control. (It may be too subtle to earn the Oscar nomination that it deserves.) There isn’t a single false note in Ronan’s playing. Emory Cohen has a nice mixture of boyish charm and anxiety as Tony – and Ronan (although she’s four years younger than Cohen) is particularly good in hinting at a maternal element in Eilis’s fond feelings for him.
Domhnall Gleeson’s portrait of Jim Farrell is perfectly judged and two of the older women in Enniscorthy are good examples of how the characters in Brooklyn keep taking you by surprise. Both at the start of the story and when she summons Eilis back to her corner shop, I felt that Brid Brennan made Miss Kelly too witchy – her expression of defeat when Eilis reacts to Miss Kelly’s small-mindedness changed my mind. Brennan is extraordinary as Miss Kelly crumples; she makes you realise how badly this woman needs to feel that she’s in charge, how fragile her sense of authority really is. Jane Brennan, as Mrs Lacey, is at first woebegone then objectionable, as a mother who wants to hold down the one daughter she has left. In a final, complexly unhappy scene between them, Eilis tells her mother about Tony, Mrs Lacey receives the news with a sad, good grace, then takes herself off to bed in miserable defeat. In smaller parts in the Irish part of the story, Fiona Glascott (Rose), Eileen O’Higgins (Eilis’s friend Nancy) and Peter Campion (Nancy’s fiancé) all do well. Over in Brooklyn, Julie Walters is completely truthful and triumphantly entertaining as the landlady, Mrs Kehoe. Jim Broadbent is thoroughly sympathetic and effective playing what is now a most unusual screen character – a decent, well-balanced Irish Catholic priest. The film’s rendering of the relationship between Eilis and Miss Fortini, her supervisor in the department store, is one of the few weaknesses. My memory of the book is that Eilis’s suspicion that Miss Fortini has sexual feelings for her arrives suddenly and startlingly, when Eilis is trying on a bathing costume for a trip with Tony to Coney Island. In the film, Jessica Paré’s Miss Fortini prowls around the department store like an old-style Hollywood lesbian and the bathing costume bit doesn’t register enough. As Tony’s little brother Frankie, James DiGiacomo has an on-the-button, show-off quality; for once, this comes across not as a characteristic of the child actor concerned but of the child he’s playing.
John Crowley makes rather too much use of Michael Brook’s score. Perhaps Crowley was uneasy, although he had no need to be, that the film was emotionally underpowered; still, at least Brook’s music does tug the heartstrings. Although I got used to it after a while, the print that I saw was persistently – excessively – dark toned. I think something was wrong with the lighting control on the Richmond Odeon equipment: the trailers before Brooklyn included Carol, which looked murkier than in the trailer I’d seen several times elsewhere[1].
18 November 2015
[1] Afternote: I’m now sure of this. I’ve watched Brooklyn a couple of times since on DVD and the images weren’t at all muddy.
