Brooklyn **** (2015, Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, Julie Walters) – Movie Review

Saoirse Ronan stars as Ellis, a bright young Irish immigrant who arrives in 1950s Brooklyn. She hoves up at old Mrs Julie Walters’s boarding house, gets a department store job and, though initially homesick, soon falls for nice Italian boy Tony (Emory Cohen, from The Place Beyond the Pines).

However, for contrived plot reasons, she returns to Ireland for a while to do her filial duty for her poor mother (Jane Brennan), leaving Tony behind and quickly falling into a new romance with the also nice local Irish boy Jim (Domhnall Gleeson). Both boys want to marry her, indeed are desperate to do so, for Ellis is a real charmer. In a love triangle, someone gets burnt.

Nick Hornby crafts a warm and bright, literate screenplay from the novel by Colm Toibin, with plenty of good lines, romantic notions, period detail and entertainment value. Despite its contrivances, the story is absorbing, though Ellis is essentially as irritating a character in love as Bathsheba in Far from the Madding Crowd, maddening in her inability for so long to do the right thing and pick the right man, and the right country.

To be harsh, it is kind of soapy, but it is intelligent, quality soap. Upmarket Mills and Boon. Nothing remotely wrong with that.

Ronan is really rather good as the heroine, frustrating dithering between two men, but developing her character convincingly as she grows up into a woman, pulling you over onto her side. Cohen and Gleeson have unrewarding roles, as pretty passive love interest, but they both inhabit the space exactly. Old pros Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent as the priest Father Flood liven it up no end with their ever-reliable turns, in both cases a little too over-the-top to be entirely truthful but pitched just right as crowd-pleasers.

The film looks a treat, moves at a good pace and has a keenly developed sense of time and place – and of old-style romance. The director is theatre man John Crowley, perhaps best known in cinema for his feature film debut Intermission (2003).

The production began principal photography on 1 April 2014 in Ireland, with three weeks’ shooting at locations including Enniscorthy, Wexford and Dublin. It then moved to Montreal, Canada, for four weeks at the Memorial chapter house of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

http://derekwinnert.com/intermission-2003-colin-farrell-cillian-murphy-classic-film-review-1103/

http://derekwinnert.com/the-place-beyond-the-pines-film-review/

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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