Movie Monday: Film Recommendations By Our Contributors
When I chose John Crowley’s Brooklyn for this article, I became curious as to just how many other people have come across this 2015 BAFTA award-winning film.
When I mention the title to my friends, I am shocked to find many of them have never heard of it. This puzzles me immensely and leads me to question why is Brooklyn seemingly not ingrained into the public consciousness in the way it thoroughly deserves to be? The answer to that lies in the quietness of its beauty. Like its central protagonist, Brooklyn is a film that is self-effacing and yet also skillfully handles its tangled subject matter.
Based on the novel by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn follows the story of young Irish woman Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) who travels from Ireland to America in the 1950s to start a new life. Eilis, overcoming many obstacles in her cultural disorientation, finally finds her life with Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen). Yet when her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) dies, Eilis’ return to Ireland leaves her two selves at war. Everyone in Eilis’ life thinks they know what’s best for her. She is a woman pulled in a tug of war across the Atlantic. It is a story of indecision and expectation which I am sure many women on the planet can relate to; the constant voices pitching in on their career or in their personal life. Yet Ellis is eventually compelled to decide what she wants and who she is.
Brooklyn is a movie for those of us displaced who never really feel like we know where we belong. Yet this experience is combated by a hopeful testament that we do, in fact, all belong. We simply must carve out our place in the world and define our own selves. This is a film of amalgamating cultures and hyphenated identities;: Irish- American, Italian-American, and daughter-wife. Eilis will always be Irish, but she is also American; a cultural mix that Brooklyn is determined to show can find a place in this world. The hyphens between identities stands in not as a division of two selves, but rather a rope of linkage between them.
When I was growing up, Brooklyn was a blanket from the world and it proved an archive of wisdom when I moved away from everything I’d ever known to go to university. As much as Brooklyn is about perpetually shifting geographical landscapes, it is also, as its title insists, a film fixated on location and tethered to looking towards the future. Home is orientated not by place but rather by its people, and that is what Brooklyn at its core represents.
This indecision between cultural heritage and new beginnings is an issue that spans decades of migration and remains an important contemporary concern. The Irish focus in Crowley’s film resurfaced in my mind in the wake of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and yet Brooklyn, I would argue, is Belfast’s cinematic foil. Although there are hints at wider cultural tensions, Brooklyn’s centre is not the tale of violence that characterises Belfast but instead a hopefully tentative message that we can find a peaceful shared existence. It focuses on the connections that bind us all together, rather than the undeniable divisions that tore 1950s America apart and still separate us today. Brooklyn does not gloss over these, but rather it self-consciously styles itself as a film about cultural kinship.
This film’s cultural resonances imbue it with a deeply personal history which requires a lead actress of some emotional calibre. Ronan, with her emotional gravitas, is more than equal to the task. If Brooklyn holds a mirror up to history it also imitates not just ‘life’ but the life of Ronan herself. She was born in New York to Irish parents, only moving back to Ireland when she was three. In an interview with The Skinny, Ronan said that “New York was always a very important place for me, even though I didn’t properly go back until I was about 14. But as soon as I did, I was convinced that that was where I wanted to be when I was older.” Such a statement marks Ronan’s own transition from an Irish childhood to an American adulthood in search of her own life, mirroring Eilis’ journey as well.
Brooklyn is a self-reflexive struggle but looks outwardly as well as inwardly in its quest for identity. In a poignant scene, Eilis volunteers at a homeless shelter where she is met with the struggling older male Irish migrant population who helped build New York from the ground up. This scene raises important questions about the exploitation of a migrant workforce and the failings of society in their negligence, a message that remains significant today. In a hauntingly beautiful moment, a man stands up amongst a sea of lost souls to warble an Irish folk song,: encapsulating the history of a country. This illuminates the collective memory that glues a culture together. Even as Ireland is emptied of its young and shrivelling up in opportunity, it is yet fiercely kept alive by the minds of its people wherever they may be.
Yet Brooklyn is a film with multiple resonances, as Eilis’ character attests to. It is also about finding out how to assert yourself in the world of the 1950s where women’s identities were still fundamentally constructed by men. Admittedly, Eilis is not a ‘strong female character’ that inspires a radical feminist reading but like Jane Austen’s Eliot, she has a quiet resolve which emerges in her arc from a timid wanderer to a worldly woman. In the end, Eilis decides her future. Returning to American customs, Eilis joins the queue that reads ‘Returning American citizens,’ divided from ‘Immigrant registration.’ Eilis is no longer a wanderer; she has found home for herself.
Brooklyn is a witty, heartfelt film where questions of belonging and cultural identity are put under the microscope to address the struggle with who we are in a world where divisions are still so prominent. It asks the audience how we can choose between our past and future, the family that we’re born with and the family that we make, the country that we’re born in and the one we might adopt, and the two selves that materialise in contention with each other as a result. Ultimately it makes the audience consider what ‘home’ means to them. To me, what springs to the forefront of my mind is that ‘home’ unequivocally is found in watching Brooklyn itself.
Words by Lydia Smith
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