Brooklyn
Director: John Crowley
Year Released: 2015
Rating: 1.5
Eilis (Saoirse Ronan), a shop girl in Ireland, is encouraged to go to America - specifically, Brooklyn in New York City - by her sister (Fiona Glascott) where she gets a job, makes friends, meets an equally flawless Italian plumber not named Mario (Emory Cohen), gets married ... and then goes back to Ireland (without her husband) following a tragedy. Not only is this a white-washed vision of American history, it's also dramatically inert (a side character's death is treated with a ho-hum attitude) and Ronan's Eilis is too taciturn to make much of a lasting impression: back in the Old Country, I kept waiting for her to actually commit adultery (with Domhnall Gleeson's character) but she's too Pristine and Upstanding and the movie immediately whisks her back to the Big Apple for an unsurprising happy ending. The immigrant experience has been captured with great passion in other projects (Kazan's America America to name but one); this is largely a yawn.
