Coming and going

Brooklyn is a specific story of a young woman immigrating from Ireland to America in 1951. Where is home? This movie will evoke recognition from anyone who has ever been homesick or wondered where she belonged. The film is based on Irish author Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn and adapted for the screen by another novelist, Nick Hornby. One sex scene and some scattered bad language give Brooklyn a PG-13 rating, a scratch on what is an otherwise excellent film.

This is a quiet film, but thoroughly charming. Drama is turned down to a low hum, like in real life, which is why director John Crowley said the film initially struggled to find financing.

“It requires great nerve on the part of a screenwriter to stick to that,” said Tóibín, referring to Hornby’s avoidance of melodrama. “But actually if you can transfer that to the screen, as Nick has done, it’s a very powerful thing to do because it goes against the viewer, the expectations. That creates in itself a sort of drama.”

Hornby said he intentionally did not write up any villains and that as a writer he works to “walk around and around a character until I see what their family and friends love in them, even if they are flawed. That to me is a whole person. There are very few people I’ve ever met who are irredeemable.”

Our heroine, Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), leaves her mother and sister in a small town in Ireland to pursue work and a better life in New York. She’s a charming young woman, and it’s no wonder men (Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen) fall for her on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. The cast is excellent, showcasing Irish talent. Julie Walters, as the head of the boarding house where Eilis lives in Brooklyn, has Maggie Smith–level skill at delivering preposterous one-liners.

This is an Irish story, with few rah-rah tributes to America aside from references to baseball and a visit to Coney Island. Making the story distinctly Irish was a smart decision because it shows how foreign cultures do make up America.

The filmmakers hadn’t planned to release the film right when hundreds of thousands of migrants were coming to Europe, but they have embraced the contemporary parallels. Like Eilis, “[Migrants] are also in search of a better life,” said Finola Dwyer, the film’s producer.

“We’re having this huge argument and debate about it in Europe at the moment,” said Hornby. “And it’s quite interesting to bring a film out in that time which says, ‘These are how countries are made. Countries are made by shifts and influxes.’”

Tóibín said he avoids “preaching” in his books, but at the time he was writing the novel many immigrants were coming to Ireland, which made people “uneasy.” So he wanted to show what it was like for an immigrant living in a new country, through the eyes of an Irish girl. In one scene the usually stoic Eilis fights back tears as she’s working a department store counter. Tóibín hopes readers and viewers, if they see a sad Polish girl working at the supermarket, might think, “That must be what she’s going through.”

“I suppose with every novel the reader learns to imagine something that they might not have imagined before,” Tóibín said. “And that, no matter what you do, has political implications.”

But the story is about memory and leaving as much as immigration. Often when we leave one place and go to another, we romanticize the place we left. Or we can romanticize the new place simply because it is new. Eilis experiences both. “I forgot what this town is like,” she says when she returns to Ireland after living in America. That statement is ambiguous: We forget both how awful a place is, and how wonderful it is.