Review: Ronan enchants in warm immigrant tale ‘Brooklyn’
“Brooklyn” is a story for anyone who has ever left home. It’s a story for those who’ve waffled in indecision, for those forming their identities and forging their own paths. It’s a story awash in muted pastel nostalgia about family and love and ambition and heritage and goodbyes. And it’s one of the loveliest films to grace cinemas this year.
There’s very little drama in this tale of a young woman, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), who leaves her small Irish town and her mother and sister in the 1950s to find a life and career in New York.
That might make it feel to some like it’s not a full movie. We’ve been trained to expect horrible things to happen to the people we’re groomed to love and root for, especially in immigrant tales. Here things are just normal.