Nathaniel's final review from Sundance
Late last year while interviewing Yves Belanger on his lensing of Wild (2014) and his ongoing working relationship with Jean Marc Vallee I noticed he had a non-Vallee project on his forthcoming filmography called Brooklyn. He spoke highly of the experience, an about face from Wild's all natural light mandate. He said it was much more stylized lighting, an 'old fashioned romantic drama'. He hoped people still wanted to see that sort of thing.
If the reaction at Sundance is any indication (and a word of caution: Sundance fever is 50/50 for the real world at best) the people will welcome it with open arms... and tear ducts.
(Fox Searchlight is also betting they will , turning Brooklyn into the single biggest sale at Sundance, with a healthy $9 million.)
The movie, based on the best-seller by Colm Toibin (adapted by Nick Hornby who just adapted Wild) is about a naive young impoverished Irish immigrant (Saoirse Ronan) who leaves home and family behind to make her life in America in the early 50s. She begins working in a department store and lives in a local girl's boarding house run by the strict Mrs Kehoe (Julie Walters, in a very crowd-pleasing role -- the dinner scenes are uniformly great fun). Despite work and shelter, she's desperately lonely and homesick. Until she meets a young Italian (Emory Cohen), that is, and romance blooms. But Ireland keeps tugging at her skirts, asking her back and another romantic possibility surfaces (enter another suitor: Domnhall Gleeson) Where and what and whom will she choose? How will she define "home"?
That's the bare skeleton of the story, but the thrill is in the the performances, particularly Saoirse Ronan who never pushes too hard in a star turn that traces a hugely successful arc from scared, young and lonely to confident and mature, and in the movie's movie-movie heightened reality. I never once forgot that I was watching a MOVIE - it won't be mistaken for realism - but that's not an insult.
So back to my the first adjective I heard about this movie before seeing it at Sundance.
"Old fashioned" is the perfect word for it. What it most reminded me of was old school sound-stage romantic melodramas. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some modern conflicts, post-sexual revolution mores, grim psychology or even (channeling my mother) "horrible language" to slip in. And the closest the film came to any of those things was a slightly more modern frankness about sex but current cinema's mandatory swearing was contained to one instance of "holy shit" -- which is almost endearing in context though frankly the film probably should have done without it.) I even almost overcame my Emory Cohen and precocious child actor allergies while watching it... almost.
I could take my mother to this and she might well love it. Which is not to say that the rest of you will not.
Grade: B+
Oscar Chances: Plentiful if it's a success with the public, but it would need that since it won't be a critical darling (again "old fashioned" and a "womans picture" in just about every way). If Fox Searchlight can capture some of the young romance craze that catapulted Titanic to ridiculous popularity or The Fault in Our Stars to major financial success expect a huge campaign for everything but particularly Actress (Ronan), Supporting Actress (Walters) and the crafts, especially production design (François Séguin of The Borgias) and costumes (Odile Dicks-Mireaux of An Education)
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