Real Estate

Brooklyn – a movie

Watching a movie With which you feel a connection, with a character or with the story, it is a different experience than simply watching a movie. And if the movie is good, that connection makes it even better. Such was the case with the movie Brooklyn.

It begins in the early 1950s in Ireland, a poor country in those days, where the lack of opportunities for the country’s youth causes them to look elsewhere, primarily in the United States. Eilis Lacey is one of those young people who wants to escape not only the limitations, but also the narrow life that Ireland offers. Urged on by her older sister who wants something better for her, Eilis is still reluctant to leave her mother and sister, the only family she has, behind to make the lonely journey across the ocean to an America that promises her. her, but it is also an unknown and strange place where she does not know anyone. But take the journey that she does, and this is the point where the movie got me.

Ireland in its poverty in the 1950s was not that different from the Ireland of 1928, the year my father left. He was eighteen, the same age as her, and he made the same journey, also alone, leaving behind his father and an older sister and the only home he would know in Cork. The similarities don’t end there. Like many Irishmen, perhaps most, they set out from the same port as her, from the city of Cobh, in southern Ireland, to make the same journey across the Atlantic. Looking at her during the long journey, dizzy and alone and full of fear as she was, my eyes filled with tears as I projected images of my father in the same situation. Were his experiences the same as hers? Was he vomiting all the way across rough seas? Was he filled with the same loneliness and doubt as she? Those comparisons and the performance of the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, who inhabits the character of Eilis with every part of her being, made the film even more moving for me.

His situation, once he gets to Brooklyn, is different from my father’s, but they are quite similar. Father Flood, an Irish priest in the United States, sponsors her into the New World and assures her a place in a women’s pension, run by a woman from the Old Country. He finds her a job in a department store and offers her spiritual advice and comfort. On my father’s side, I had a nine-year-old older brother who had made the same trip from Ireland and who was sponsoring him. My father lived with him after his arrival and got a job, with the help of his brother, as a laborer, a first step in learning a trade.

As Eilis’s story progresses, her perspective improves, although she misses her mother and sister very much and writes them all the time. With a career in mind beyond that of a sales clerk in a department store, she takes evening classes in accounting and becomes more than proficient at it. She attends a dance with several of the young women from her boarding house, and there she meets a young man named Tony, an Italian-American who is polite and decent in a way that is rarely seen in young men today. He falls in love with her immediately, while her affection for him grows more slowly. At first they keep company from a distance. He takes her for a walk to Coney Island and a fun day at the beach. He meets his family at a dinner at his home. He tells her his version of the American dream, of starting a business and building a house in a part of Long Island that is still covered in sand dunes and beach grass. He asks her to marry him. By then, she is in love with him and begins to see that his dreams could be hers as well.

She then learns from Father Flood of a family tragedy in Ireland, and Eilis is forced to return, a brief visit being her promise to Tony. But once there, he returns to his old life, albeit in better circumstances. Her mother convinces her to stay longer than planned, so she can attend a best friend’s wedding. Eilis takes a temporary job as an accountant in a factory and now earns a decent salary. Through his friend, he meets a young man and begins to see him casually, reluctantly at first, but little by little he gets closer to him. As it continues, the new job and deepening relationship with the man make you wonder: Will she forget about Tony and stay in Ireland now that she is immersed in the family life of her homeland, but with better prospects? Then an incident with the spiteful woman Eilis previously worked for at a small grocery store in her village brings her situation to a head. “I had forgotten,” he tells the woman, referring to the restricted and moralistic attitudes of Irish life, one of the reasons he had left in the first place.

Brooklyn is a movie worth watching multiple times, for the heartbreaking story and great performance of Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, Jim Broadbent as the kind and wise Father Flood, and Julie Walters as Mrs. Keogh, the loving Irish landlady of Eilis’s pension, who uses wit and a sharp tongue while taking care of her daughters. For many reasons Brooklyn it is a movie worthy of an Oscar.

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