Movie: Brooklyn

I watched Brooklyn on my father's whim, and had I remembered it was a weekend when he invited me to watch with him, I probably would have said no. Still, and I'm coming clean here, Brooklyn is where Steve Rogers (aka Captain America aka a hefty fraction of the things I currently care about) hails from - so I was like, "Who am I to say no?"

What's interesting is that Brooklyn actually tells the story of Irish immigrants in the early 1950s - a few years after Steve canonically goes under. I would apologize for the shameless Captain America references I have made and will make, but to be honest, it made the film viewing a richer experience for me, in its own little way. Haha. I'll try to minimize though, to keep a semblance of an actual film review.

Essentially, Brooklyn tells the story of a young Irish girl, Eilis (ey-lish, played by Saoirse Ronan) as she migrates to Brooklyn and learns to navigate her life independently.

Here's more detailed summary if you want to the tl;dr version: Eilis lives in a small town in Ireland, where she feels she has no future. Her sister, Rose, volunteers her for a migration program, and she is funded by the local pastor to migrate to Brooklyn. She says a tearful goodbye to her sister and mother, and is heartbreakingly homesick for the first act of the film. She stays in a boarding house with other young female immigrants and starts working in a local, slightly high-end perfume store. The priest, Father Flood, enrolls her in bookkeeping (accounting) classes, which she wants to study because it's what her sister does in Ireland. She eventually meets Tony, an Italian immigrant, and he courts her. They eventually start dating and Eilis starts feeling more at home in Brooklyn. Just as things start getting better, Eilis is informed that Rose has died of mysterious causes. She and Tony secretly get married, and then Eilis goes back to Ireland. There, suddenly, she finds a potential future that was nowhere to be found before. She lets herself be courted by a wealthy bachelor, lets her mother hope she's staying in Ireland for good, until her previous employer, an awful old lady, threatens to tell the town that she is married. This serves as her wake up call about why she wanted to leave the small town in the first place. Things go full circle, and she arrives back in Brooklyn, reunited with Tony.

General Review
I loved this movie. I came in not expecting much, and even expecting to be bored since I read the synopsis, but I cried a million times. This movie knows how to pull your heartstrings, and what's great about it is that while it breaks your heart into a thousand pieces, it's smart in how it mends it back up. You're able to achieve a sense of peace at the end because while things aren't all wrapped neatly with a pretty bow, they're resolved and there's closure. It's just a great treat for the heart and the mind.

What Worked
Plot. I loved the plot. It's just one of those very character-driven, very simple plots where you're able to get to know the character/s so deeply and so beautifully. It's like forming a relationship with the character, almost. What I loved most, though, were the narrative elements that repeated themselves showed the amazing journey Eilis has been through - the reintroduction of Miss Kelly's character as a reminder of the small town life Eilis wanted to escape in the first place, mentoring on the ship to Brooklyn to show how far she's come since the first act. Beautifully done.

Characters. What I loved about this movie was that even though you didn't know the width and breadth of the stories of each character, you got to know them deeply through their relationship with Eilis. Like, we don't know much about the girls in the boarding house, but we know them well enough through Eilis' eyes, and that's what makes each character so unique. Absolutely no character was unnecessary, not one character was there for the sake of keeping up archetypes - they were all there as essential characters that aided Eilis' journey into maturity.

Let's talk about Eilis for a second. Her story, aka the film's story, unraveled so beautifully. My god. At every junction of her story, you could just feel the emotion so viscerally. But what's great about it is that since we're talking about Europeans here, the emotions were incredibly understated in terms of how much they showed when they were with other characters. It's amazing, but it came through so well even if it was so underacted. Ughhh. Everything from Eilis and Rose packing Eilis' things, to Eilis' anxiety in the ship, to her homesickness (that was really the only emotional part of the film that wasn't underacted, but it was so amazing, I was crying the whole time), to how she changed from someone who felt broken and incomplete, to how, in her own words, she felt like she was slowly able to pick up the pieces of herself and finally feel like she was actually in Brooklyn. Gaaaah. HOW. And when Rose died, I felt it in my bones. It was so awful. Even the social pressure of going to her best friend's wedding, to being paired up with Jim and enjoying it, to being reminded she was married - it was just all executed so well. Incredible.

ALSO, Tony's family is incredible. His sassy little brother stole the show. What a great and surprising source of lightness in otherwise incredibly serious movie.

Actors. SAOIRSE RONAN FOR ALL THE AWARDS. How was she even able to balance so many emotions while being generally publicly unemotional as Europeans are?? She was able to play the character so well, it's just amazing. She was never over or under acting - she was always just right, and she played Eilis with such consistency, despite the incredible amount of changes she undergoes in the film. I mean, she changes a lot, but she's still essentially Eilis. It's pretty amazing to get that exactly right but she managed to do it.

Also, Emory Cohen, who plays Tony, is just adorable. It's impossible not to fall in love with him a little, with how endearing he is. He's not even the dashing or debonair or any of those types - he's just a simple guy who works as a plumber, but he's so freaking in love with Eilis it just melts your heart. And he's such a good person, like you can tell pretty much from the beginning that he's just a good person to the bone. Really amazing to pull acting like that off!

Scenes. I didn't know what to put this under, so I just put "scenes," lol. Here are some scenes I still can't get out of my mind:

• Eilis reading and re-reading Rose's letters to her and crying in her bedroom. The scene where she's literally crouched over the letter and sobbing onto it - god. That just broke my heart. I can't forget it.
• Eilis helping out at the soup kitchen and witnessing the old Irish men singing an old folk song together. That scenes just had such a beautiful tone (pun intentional) in how it conveyed her homesickness, not heartbreaking like in the other scene, but really just a quiet longing for the feeling of home and belonging. Beautiful.
• Eilis and Tony on the bus, and Tony's just asking her if he can have another shot at courting her. Simple and beautiful, just like their relationship. ♥
• Eilis standing up when Miss Kelly threatens her. When she declares her name and you just feel her collecting herself and deciding then and there that she has to go back to Brooklyn, god, what a moment. A+.
• Tony asking his little brother for help writing a letter to Eilis. This was one of the few scenes that wasn't told from Eilis' perspective, despite the movie generally being told from her point of view, and I loved it. It showed how out of his depth Tony was, how he wanted to be good for Eilis and earn her attention. He didn't feel entitled to it even after they were married. He honestly wanted to continue wooing her. If that's not adorable, I don't know what is.

All of this together helped make Brooklyn one of my favorite films I've seen in a while, even taking the superhero franchises into account. I can't think of anything that I found fault in - there wasn't really anything I had any issues with.

Finally, as my closing, I would just like to say: Steve Rogers' grandparents were Irish immigrants, so a lot of the time, I saw Eilis as a sort of Steve Rogers. And we all know she eventually married an Italian named Tony. So I mean. You know. I'm just saying. ;)