Strarring: Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Michael Zegen, Julie Walters
Director: John Crowley
Running Time: 112mins
UK Certificate: 12A
Colm Toibin’s novel about an Irish girl finding her feet in New York has been much admired, but I found it a little underpowered. Nick Hornby’s adaptation suffers from similar problems, namely that not an awful lot happens, and when it does it’s so understated as to be almost invisible.
One thing that is undeniable is Ronan’s performance as Eilis Lacey; a sweet, honest, nice girl who has to suddenly cope with being the breadwinner of her family. Ronan is not the town’s glamour puss, or even pretty, but her puffy face, with piercing, honest eyes, is a wonder to behold. She is always sympathetic, completely real and without her the film would be even more paper thin. Eilis lives in a stifling, suffocating Irish town in the 1950s, where buying shoe polish on a Sunday is seen as an evil sin. All the boys look the same, with their oiled hair and rugby blazers, so it is a relief when she is picked as the member of the family to go to Brooklyn to find a new life.
After a truly horrible crossing Eilis stays in a boarding house with four other young girls under the watchful eye of landlady Julie Walters. Here we get a definition of scene stealing – Walters is simply hilarious; cross, stuffy but with a heart of gold and a rod of iron. Eilis slowly begins to find herself, working in a department store and starting night school. Her ambition is to be an accountant.
She also meets a sweet boy, but horror of horrors, he is Italian. If every film you have ever watched gives the impressions these two races hated each other in New York, here the biggest problem is Eilis learning how to eat spaghetti. They go to the movies, and Coney Island, all very sweet, not particularly interesting. Then they decide to get married, but their honeymoon is caught short when a tragedy pulls Eilis back to Ireland.
The real problem here is the inertia of the story. If you are going to bother to recreate the Ireland and New York of the 1950s in such detail, then do something with it. We already know young girls had to go to dances to meet men, and the boys are after one thing, but the reaction is a large, so what. It’s not about any religious themes, or about race divides, so what is it really about?
Ronan does her best with a performance which will surely lead to bigger and better things, but we’ve known for a while now just how good she is. Gleeson too is good as the small town’s big fish, the son of capitalists who will surely inherit a big house and pots of money, if Eilis is interested, which she obviously isn’t.
To its credit the film is a pretty faithful recreation of the book, and even throws in the odd striking visual just to remind everyone it is actually a movie. Ronan’s reaction when she sees a deserted Irish beach, after becoming used to the squeeze of Coney Island, is priceless. There are grehat supporting characters too, particularly Eilis’s pals at the boarding house who help her blossom with fashion advice. All in all though it’s a TV movie at heart.
Overall verdict: slight story with little dramatic punch but with a performance from Ronan as the ugly duckling to savour and enjoy. It may find its audience on dvd for a Sunday afternoon.
Reviewer: Mike Martin
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