Once in Brooklyn, Eilis is a stranger living in a strange land, a common issue for immigrants that is compounded by her generally introverted nature. She gets a job working at a high-end department store in Manhattan, but it seems all wrong for a shy girl from a small Irish town to be making small talk with wealthy women in fur coats and gloves. At night she takes classes in bookkeeping with the hope of becoming an accountant. She lives at a boarding house run by the stern, but ultimately kind-hearted Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters), who takes in immigrant girls and tries to keep them uncorrupted while they assimilate. Some of the film’s most delightful moments take place around Mrs. Kehoe’s dinner table, as the girls who have lived there for some time and have become fully Americanized display a robust sense of independence that often flies in the face of Mrs. Kehoe’s old-fashioned Christian propriety. Unlike Miss Kelly, though, Mrs. Kehoe isn’t a cruel busybody, and late in the film she displays a sense of real charity that makes a crucial difference in Eilis’s life.

Everything changes for Eilis when she meets Tony (Emory Cohen), an Italian-American plumber who takes an immediate interest in her at a church dance. While they are both from European heritage, in many ways Eilis and Tony are worlds apart, especially since Tony is American-born while Eilis is still learning the ways of her new homeland. Tony is fundamentally decent and kind, and when he becomes Eilis’s boyfriend, her whole worldview shifts. She suddenly has something to live for in the U.S., rather than marking time there while thinking about her old life back home. We keep waiting for Tony to display some darker tendency or ugly machismo, but he remains steadfastly nice, understanding, and decorous, almost to a fault. He is very nearly too good to be true, which is why it is so distressing when Eilis is called back to Ireland and starts becoming involved with Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), a local boy who hadn’t previously given her the time of day. Suddenly, the girl who had no prospects has prospects on two different continents, and the story draws to the climatic issue of where she will finally set down permanent roots.

Adapted by novelist/screenwriter Nick Hornby (An Education, About a Boy), Brooklyn sacrifices the first-person narrative that Tóibín used in the novel, which means we get less insight into Eilis’s inner world. However, Saoirse Rose gives a wonderfully nuanced performance in playing a wallflower who slowly blooms and is all the more beautiful for it. And, even if we don’t know everything that is going through her mind, we are able to sense her emotions, whether it be simple resolve to make her new situation work, or the grinding guilt of knowing that she may be leaving something behind for something better.

The cinematography by Yves Bélanger (Dallas Buyers Club) is literally glowing, and the film paints a decidedly rosy picture of Brooklyn in the mid-1950s. There may be a bit too much nostalgic love for days gone by, but the film’s visual beauty works well with its good nature and optimism. Brooklyn is a film about fundamentally decent characters who are striving to do the right thing, which lends it a moral directness that is refreshing. Director John Crowley (Is Anybody There?) manages the drama well, but also infuses it with moments of humor, even when things are not going well (such as Eilis’s awful trip across the Atlantic, which involves a terrible bout of seasickness compounded by the people in the adjoining cabin locking her out of the bathroom). There is an enjoyable lightness to the film that is easy to mistake for simple-minded nostalgia. If Brooklyn feels a bit odd in its insistent search for the silver linings, it is because film art is too often associated with the dark, the dreary, and the downbeat. In that regard, it is a decidedly refreshing change of pace.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment