Brooklyn

Is there anything quite so chilling as the empty promise of ‘heartwarming’? So it was that I took my seat for Brooklyn with a good deal of apprehension before this tale of Irish girl Eilis in the 1950s starting a new life in America. I had seen a trailer which promised a story of cloying sweetness, viewed through a prism of misty nostalgia, served with a large dollop of blarney and a double-helping of begorrah on the side. Now I have to report how wrong I was, for I was captivated within moments of the start of this very fine adaptation of Colm Tóibin’s novel, and the spell wasn’t broken for a moment until the lights came up.

The towering star of the film is Saoirse Ronan, whose beauty and grace are matched by an uncommon sense of emotional truth and honesty, without which the part would have been impossible to believe. Take the moment when Eilis meets her Italian-American boyfriend Tony’s family for the first time, and the parents admire the dextrous way she uses her fork to eat spaghetti (then an exotic foodstuff for a newcomer not long off the boat). The scene is a little gem of delicately observed comedy, but the clincher is Eilis’s confession that she’d been practising with plates of pasta before she came. Here’s an endearing summation of all that Eilis is about: a young woman who leaves nothing to chance and is incapable, it seems, of telling a lie. Torn: Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) embraces Jim (Domhnall Gleeson) and her Irish roots Tipped for awards: Saoirse Ronan as Eilis A lesser actress might have reduced the part to mawkish sentiment, but Ronan conveys utter conviction in everything she does, and allows us to understand with perfect clarity the turbulent inner emotional life of this woman who says very little until she’s certain of what she wants to say.

Eilis is torn between the love she thinks she feels for Tony – a roughhewn but essentially good young man – and her longing for the old country, an Ireland of breath-taking beauty, and the people she’s left behind there. Yet New York has its allure: this is a land of plenty, rich with fabulous 1950s fashion – pastel colours, woollen jackets and doubleknit sweaters – and eligible men and, most of all, a future far beyond the limited promise that the backwater of Ireland back then has to offer.

Director John Crowley has assembled a flowing series of vignettes, always from Eilis’s point of view, taking us from the swish department store where she works the pneumatic tubes to her boarding house, where the matronly and sharp-witted Mrs Kehoe (the wonderful Julie Walters, fizzing with sparkling joie de vivre) presides over dinner with telling interruptions to the bickering gossip of the giddy other girls. The loving detail of the period is perfectly rendered, and we look back to the past with the same impossible desire that Eilis has for the country of her birth.

Look no further if you’ve been hankering for a film of mature intelligence and artistry: faultless and heartfelt, Brooklyn is an unmissable treat.