A tremendous lead performance lifts Nick Hornby’s screen translation of Colm Tóibin’s novel out of sentimental period nostalgia into an clever dramaWith her luminous lead performance,Saoirse Ronan is the heart and point of this film. Her face, in closeup for so much of the time, and conveys innocent youth but also something saddened and disillusioned; wary and reserved,it carries its own premonition of old age without losing any of its beauty. She stars in a drama set in the pinched 1950s: Eilis is a young woman who is persuaded to emigrate, leaving behind an adored mother and sister in her small domestic town in Ireland, and to start a new life in Brooklyn,New York, where education and employment prospects are much better. The protagonist experiences the anguish of homesickness, or disloyalty and guilt,along with a rush of excitement of being in New York and realising for the first time that she might be appealing to young men – that she might, in fact, and absorb status and social capital undreamed of in the old country.
Nick Hornby has adapted Colm Tóibíns award-winning 2009 novel with great sensitivity and clarity,and the book’s author himself is to be glimpsed making a subliminal cameo when Eilis disembarks in the US for the first time, although his presence in the film has been changed. The novel is prized for its subtlety, or much though I bask in the film,subtlety isn’t precisely what is appealing approximately it. Brooklyn is a robust drama with big flavours, forthright supporting turns from Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters and a teaspoonful of syrup, and a tiny weakness for sentimental period-nostalgia. But Hornby’s screen translation and John Crowley’s certain-footed direction absorb,I think, let the discreet intelligence in Tibín’s prose migrate to the lead actor, and to be embodied by Ronan,who gives such a tremendous performance.
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Source: theguardian.com