Deborah Ross

Lush, lyrical, exquisite

This is a film to enter your heart and your bones. And there’s not an Aston Martin in sight

Brooklyn is a wee slip of a thing compared to the Bond film, Spectre, and cost $12 million, as opposed to $300 million, but what it lacks in length, budget, pre-title stunt sequences, theme songs, sports cars, exotic locales, babes in stages of undress, villains with master plans, Omega watches, rooftops chases, speedboats and exploding buildings, it more than makes up for with real storytelling and real feeling, which you just can’t create from post-production CGI, don’t you know.

Based on the wonderful novel by Colm Tóibín, with a script by Nick Hornby, and directed by John Crowley (who has come up through the theatre, and whose screen work includes Boy A and Intermission), this is old-fashioned, traditional storytelling at its most exquisite and moving; a tearjerker that doesn’t put a foot wrong, and doesn’t make you feel as if you’ve been had. (My tears are so easily jerked I always feel I’ve been had unless, as in this instance, I am willing to concede the film has earned it.) It stars Saoirse (pronounced ‘Seer-Shah’) Ronan as Eilis (pronounced ‘Aye-Lish’), a young Irish woman who emigrates to America in the 1950s and has a sister called Rose, pronounced ‘Rose’, which is a relief.

The film opens, lushly and lyrically — the cinematography is lush and lyrical throughout — in the small town of Enniscorthy, in Wexford, where Eilis works for a few days a week in the grocery shop owned by Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), known as Nettles Kelly, because she is nasty and stings. Eilis lives with her widowed mother (Jane Brennan) and Rose (Fiona Glascott), but there’s nothing for her here, beyond Nettles Kelly so, with the help of the church, her passage has been arranged to New York, where she might pursue a better life for herself.

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