Brooklyn - a movie review

MOVIE REVIEW

By Dan McDonald

 

 

                I was intrigued by a movie entitled “Brooklyn”. From the tourist’s perspective I have grown to love New York City. I have stood in Brooklyn Heights on a cold December evening and admired the lights of Manhattan across the East River. I have visited the art museum, the botanical gardens, and the museum dedicated to the subway and the public metropolitan transportation system all in Brooklyn. I have passed through the red door into Roberta’s after taking a walk in the neighborhood to see the graffiti, street art, and cement plant that not every tourist notices in New York City. I wondered what a movie entitled Brooklyn would have in store to offer me.

                The movie had, at least what is for me a Brooklyn feel about it. But what do I know? I have only been a tourist not a resident. I saw a downtown intersection and waited for the light to signal for us to walk and spotted the people across the way waiting to walk towards me. I had crossed at the same intersection slightly east of the Brooklyn Bridge. But as it turned out, this movie was not exactly a movie about Brooklyn. Brooklyn was the destination of an immigrant from a small Irish community in the early 1950’s. While still in Ireland, word came to her that she had a sponsor. She would have a place to live in Brooklyn and a job too. The movie was a joint effort; an American film company, the BBC, and an Irish film company. The setting was in the 1950’s when American immigration was by law mostly an invitation to Europeans to come to America. This was the reality of the times and the movie offers no commentary on the history of those times. It is more simply the story of an Irish immigrant named Eilis Lacey, one immigrant representing the stories of so many immigrants.

                Don’t be fooled, the story of an immigrant is the story of humankind always moving onwards, always leaving home to seek to find one’s own place, one’s own way, one’s own home. This is the beauty of the movie “Brooklyn”. Saoirse Ronan superbly presents the person of Eilis Lacey. Ronan gives a performance that rightly deserves the Golden Globe making her one of its nominees for Best Actress for her performance in Brooklyn. You would be mistaken if you imagine because you have never been an immigrant you have no place in the story of an immigrant’s journey across the sea. We moderns, almost all of us, journey to a new life. It is not only one who boards an ocean crossing ship, but one who moves from one state to another, or one who moves thirty miles away and takes up life with a spouse from a different family and a different home in his or her background. We all seek to move forward from one home to find our homes. This is the story beautifully told in Brooklyn.

                Most of us seek to find new homes. Partly we are driven by a feeling that there is something we want to leave behind in a life that seems to be bound in a smallness of vision we feel we must escape. There are the gossips whose lives have no vision beyond our little community and use their knowledge to pass judgment on all the flaws of all the people who pass through the doorway into a small town store. There is a feeling we must escape or we will be forever held in the grips of what is expected of and for us, when as yet we know not what it is that we want to be held to or what we imagine ought to be expected of us. We simply want to escape and find out these answers for ourselves. We want to know these answers for ourselves and not just live in the shadows and mechanics of someone else’s dreams and recipes for life.

                But the reality we are persons who can leave home, but into whom home has been interwoven into the fabric of who we are. The anchor is pulled up. A ship begins to leave the berth in the port with teary eyed people waving good-bye expressing sadness over the distance about to separate our lives from those who have always been a part of what we call home. I cannot watch the story presented by Saorise Ronan through the person of Eilis Lacey without thinking of my journey from Illinois to Oklahoma. My father and oldest brother helped me to move. They sat together in one vehicle and I took a small nephew in my automobile. The little nephew asked me about ten miles down the road when we would be there. I imagined a recurring question the rest of the way. I told him, it would be dark before we got there so that he would not need to ask again until it was dark. He didn’t. I was proud of how grown up a five or six year old nephew was. Along the way he noticed rocks that had fallen from the cut away hills in the Ozarks alongside the expressway. Eventually we stopped along the road and I picked him up one of the rocks we saw as we passed through Missouri on the road between Illinois and Oklahoma. He told me later, although having children of his own, that he still has those rocks tucked away in his possessions. One leaves home, but home never leaves us. So I could not watch the story of Eilis Lacey without feeling once more my own story of leaving home to try to find home.

                When we leave home to find home we can almost never estimate the pain of homesickness that comes with the journey.  I left Illinois, a state, especially in the north central area where I grew up that had a metropolitan feel about it even in the rural areas filled with farmland. I found myself in Oklahoma where there is a rural feeling even in metropolitan areas. I left Illinois where factories asked people to have bachelor’s degrees and came to Oklahoma where bosses had not necessarily graduated from high school. That is all changed now, but that is how it was when I moved. There was a time when I was disgruntled and remembered how everything was better, the people more authentic and trustworthy, and everything was more like it should be in Illinois than what I discovered in Oklahoma. I could see the same feelings in Eilis Lacey as she saw her party girl roommates in Brooklyn, or as she got chewed on by a boss for not being cheerful to customers so they would want to come back to the store. She confessed her pain to her priest who told her that this was the way of homesickness.

There is a horrible lonely feeling between leaving home and finding home

 

                Life goes on in these situations. We feel isolated. We are frightened by a lack of a social network. We are determined to do the extra things to give ourselves a fighting chance, at least we do once we have absorbed so much pain we just want things to change. Maybe if you are a woman selling goods in a department store, you begin taking night classes to learn bookkeeping where you can be an asset to the store with a better future. Or confronted with a recession and few jobs, you find a place that is occasionally hiring so you are determined to go to the doorstep of the manager who hires and every week you ask him what he has until at last even though you are not part of his normal hiring network he gives you a job. In the midst of it you change unknown to yourself. You find inner strength in the drive to succeed, to become a part of life once more, to find a purpose when all you feel is that maybe you made a mistake making this journey.

                Slowly a new life takes shape. You find a purpose in your church helping the poor who are broken down even more than you. I have heard a Muslim living in Austin, talking of going to the Austin police department to see if she could wrap Christmas gifts collected by the police department for children from poor families who might otherwise receive no gifts. She doesn’t believe in Christmas but she wants to be a part of something in her new home. Besides she says with a bit of fire against all the judgment she hears, it will be easier for the police department to watch her since she is a dangerous Muslim making war against Christians. Maybe you start writing or going to night school, or joining a theater, or finding a civic related activity of wanting to build a new park in a part of town that is run down and seems to have lost hope. You do it not because you are good, or because you are called, but because you are far from home and alone.

                Then there comes a slowly changing sense about your new environment. A boy asks Eilis Lacey to dance. He is not an Irish boy even though the dance is an Irish church’s dance. He says he likes Irish girls. Even the party girls aren’t sure an Irish girl should trust an Italian guy. She finds she is talking to the party girls she felt so different from herself. She is discovering they have important life lessons to share with her. The boss sees her happy and wonders if she can share this newfound joy to other sales personnel. There are smiles once more about life. This place so far from home is turning into a place where a different kind of network of people with whom you interact, and a special friend that thinks the world of you have become part of your life so far from home. You didn’t really see it coming. You are building the foundations to something turning into something so much like a home.

 

                But an old home does not die easily. It reaches out and tells you what you have left. A family member dies and will be buried before you can return. A friend, who was a good friend, is getting married and could you attend? With your bookkeeping skills there is a place for you in a shop where your help is needed. There are memories you remember and they are sometimes stronger than what they ever felt when you knew them. They are remembered when you feel the tug of war between the place that was home and the place beginning to be home. I couldn’t watch Saoirse Ronan and Eilis Lacey without remembering my own journey, even remembering parts of my journey I had long forgotten.

                As I watched her, my thoughts went back to a young woman, now a grandmother, but one who was at the time a young woman. I was in college in Illinois. It was a gal who someone told me in high school they thought they could set me up with. I didn’t trust blind dates. I always had the idea that someone was passing off someone they felt sorry for to me because they felt sorry for me. She didn’t go to the same high school as I and we never met. I didn’t have a positive view of life in high school. I never agreed to the blind date. I went to college. My second year in college I had a class and I met this gal, the very same gal the guy in high school had tried to set me up with on a blind date. The class was exceptionally boring. The instructor was a student teaching a lower level course. She read her notes, often verbatim from our textbook. She did it with a perfectly trained monotone voice as if she were attempting for a spot on Saturday Night Live, playing the boring teacher. She had the skit down to perfection.  I worked in the cafeteria dish room right before this class. I found it easy to fall asleep. The girl who someone once offered to set me up with on a blind date, now became my guardian. She sat by me in class and would give me a nudge with her elbow into my ribs whenever I started to nod off in class. There was another guy from my floor in the same class. Whenever the class ended we walked together from class to a place where we would all go our different directions to our next classes. I decided after nearly the whole semester to ask her out. I asked the guy from my floor to find something else to do. He could be a sort of strange guy and I wanted to be alone with her to ask her out. Everything was going according to plan until she noticed the other guy wasn’t with us and asked where he went. I felt a sudden pang of remorse that basically I had asked him to get lost for a few minutes. I think he probably had enough sense to know I wasn’t making an unreasonable request. But I didn’t have enough sense to know that I wasn’t asking something unreasonable. I suddenly felt like the heel that had told someone to get lost. I never asked her out that day or any other day. The semester ended with our leaving to go our different directions. There are always stories in the past that are that way. One can wonder if maybe leaving wasn’t the biggest mistake of one’s life. One begins to forget that so much has changed. In the new home there is that party girl that is becoming a friend, that significant other that is turning out to be one of the best persons you have ever known, that boss who is as much a life resource as a boss, that church you have become a member of, those civic responsibilities you have discovered. But there is something you left behind that wants to own you as much as there is something in your new life you want to be owned by. At this point, who you are, what your purpose is, even your moral compass is disoriented until you cannot be certain of anything until you feel you know where home is.

                That is the story told in the movie “Brooklyn” and I could not watch it without feeling those questions that often plagued me; if leaving my old home had been a horrible mistake? I thought for the first time in decades of the young lady who poked me in the ribs with her elbow to keep me from embarrassing myself by falling asleep in class. I am glad that I can answer that wondering. I know she went on and married a guy and together they ran a farm. I knew her well enough to know that would have been the sort of life she dreamed about. I know me well enough to know that would have been the sort of life my Dad dreamed about. So if you asked me if ever I think I made a mistake because I didn’t ask her out. I know the answer. Of course I made a mistake, not because we should have fallen in love and gotten married, but because she was a gal well worth knowing better. There are regrets important enough to teach us not to make the same mistake again, but they aren’t meant to be regrets that make you think your life was derailed and will never again get on track. The reality is that as much as my old home invested its influences into my life forever; even so the decisions, actions, and experiences I invested in my life into creating a new home these also have forever become a part of the person I am. It is all there, the old and the new represented in me when I stretch out my hand say to a new acquaintance, “Pleased to meet you, my name is Dan McDonald.” That is why these days one of the things I also say to people is, “you should go and see Brooklyn, it is simply that good.”