“Your poor sister. She’ll be looking after your mother for the rest of her life.” Ellis (Saoirse Ronan) is going to America, a journey financed and supported in every other way by her sister, Rose (Fiona Glascott). Uncertain about the trip as she may be, Ellis shows admirable resolve when confronted by Miss Kelly (Brid Brennan), owner of the tiny grocery shop Enniscorthy, in County Wexford where Ellis has been working.
As she endures what turns out to be her last day at the shop, Ellis observes Miss Kelly insult customers and employees alike. It’s no surprise then, when Miss Kelly learns that her favorite worker is leaving, that she finds a way to offend, Ellis too.
While these first moments of Brooklyn might suggest that Ellis is escaping a stifling small town, in fact, her choice to go is a difficult one. Not only does she feel regret at leaving Rose and their mother Mary (Jane Brennan) — who has raised her girls alone and with no small fortitude of her own — but she also has no way of knowing what lies ahead. This, of course, is a familiar immigrant’s story. During the ’50s, when the film is set, that story includes particular hardships, from the lengthy voyage to Ellis Island (punctuated by bouts of seasickness) to the stress of relocating in the new world and forging relationships with strangers.
That these familiar plot points form a girl’s experience is not lost on Brooklyn, based on a novel by Colm Toibin, scripted by Nick Hornsby, and directed by John Crowley. Like many immigrants, Ellis lays plans for her new life; with the help of Father Flood (Jim Broadbent), she secures lodging in Mrs. Kehoe’s (Julie Walters) Brooklyn boarding house, dedicated to serving unmarried girls, as well as a job at a department store, where she’s instructed in the fictions of customer relations by the perfectly poised Miss Fortini (Jessica Paré). Beyond this, she takes classes in order to gain an accounting certificate, with the aim of structuring a professional career.
That she meets a boy won’t be a surprise either, though the film does its best to make this arc at least a little complicated. To that end, the evolving relationship with a plumber named Tony (Emory Cohen) is not exactly layered: he’s sweet, she’s focused, he’s impressed, she’s courageous. The difficulties the couple faces have less to do with immediate circumstances — conventional plot points like money or jealousy — than with broad notions of home and family, how you understand yourself in relation to the world, how you understand the world as it swirls around you.
In posing such questions, Brooklyn is less invested in finding answers than in providing contexts. As immigration persists into the 21st century as a set of relations — to time (past and future), to places (old loyalties, new communities), and to patterns (how might habits of repression or resentment be transformed into vistas of possibility?) — it remains unresolved and ever shifting. To imagine this abstraction as experience, or better, to help you imagine it, the film turns to images, of faces, of streets, of seashores.
Amid these expected metaphors, you find the unexpected. Ireland features cobblestones and church and rolling green hills, New York offers the bustle of a department store, the delectable anxiety of a local dance, as Ellis gazes across a room in search of warmth, a smile, a gesture that seems, even for an instant, open or generous. Most insistently, the film focuses on Ellis’ search, her stunning pale blue eyes, her look over a shoulder, he walk away from the camera down a sidewalk.
For all these cues, Ellis’ experience is repeatedly internal: she’s quiet and observant, she’s careful. Her most exuberant expressions emerge in her relationship with her sister Rose. The letter writing is made visible in conventional ways: the girls read one another’s letters, they hear each other’s voices, they tear up or smile at memories and hopes. Even they don’t say exactly what they mean: Ellis reports that she’s met a boy, Rose is working long hours. Yet theirs becomes the film’s most vibrant connection, the most colorfully conveyed and most vivacious. As absent as each is in her sister’s life, she is also convincingly present.
Just so, the girls grapple with their shared understanding of their mother’s experience, which the film leaves primarily off screen. Needy and strong, angry and bighearted, Mary is a mystery for her daughters and also a model. They look on her from distances, they dedicate themselves to her, they persuade themselves that they will never be her, and then, they might be.