Having written the movies "An Education" and "Wild" and the novels "Funny Girl" and "How to Be Good," Nick Hornby is one of the few straight men who has a real and sustained interest in writing about female protagonists.
His typically witty screen adaptation of Colm Toibin's novel "Brooklyn" is a conventional tearjerker — a Mom movie — but despite its familiar structure it's a thing of beauty, a delicate, tender period piece about nice people trying to do their best.
Hornby and director John Crowley very quickly establish why young Ellis Lacey (a stellar Saoirse Ronan) would want to depart her suffocating Irish town in the early 1950s and head for New York, where she moves in with a kindly yet acerbic matron (a superb Julie Walters) at a boarding house for young women scrambling for an exit strategy.
One housemate says she's tired of waiting outside the bathroom for another girl; she wants to wait outside her own bathroom, for some awful husband to finish reading the papers on the toilet.
Lonely and shy and nearly silent, Ellis takes a job at a department store and rues her mistake: She misses her mother and her older sister, Rose. But thanks to a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent) she starts to make her way in the New World, taking bookkeeping courses and even meeting a nice Italian-American plumber (Emory Cohen).
A colleague asks whether he talks incessantly about baseball and his mother. If not, she says, he's a catch.
The many witty and genuinely funny exchanges in the script keep brightening up what could be soapy material, and the fundamental decency of most of the characters gives the movie a warm glow.
When Ellis returns for a visit to Ireland, she hasn't told anyone about her man back home, whom she has secretly married, and yet completely without intending to she finds herself drawing close to a local boy (Domhnall Gleeson, who with his flaming red hair dyed brown looks like Benedict Cumberbatch's little brother).
Also by accident, she lands herself a good job in bookkeeping, and you can feel the dilemma: Ellis could have a perfectly happy life in either Brooklyn or Ireland, but one is home and one isn't.
I can't picture a movie like this drawing much of an audience without a true box-office attraction in the lead, and Ronan isn't that. Moreover, the film is too old-fashioned and conventional to contend for major awards. Still, this is a sincere and sweet prestige title, the kind of film that seems like a fit for a posh distributor like Sony Pictures Classics.
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