Brooklyn * * * * 1/2

Who directed the following films: High Fidelity, About A Boy, An Education, Wild ?

Don’t know? Neither do I.   But like most people I can tell you who wrote them.

Same with this new film, Brooklyn.

Nick Hornby has done the impossible. He is a screenwriter with a name which is a bigger drawer-card than the directors. Good for him!

Good for him too that he wrote this beautiful screenplay.  Brooklyn is about ten times better than what I expected when I first saw the poster.  It looked really wet!  Like the loathsome The Notebook.

But don’t judge a book by its cover -  or a film by its poster.

Brooklyn is a simple story. Set in the 50’s a young Irish lass, Ellis, decides to try her luck in America as the prospects in her town don’t look promising.  

From the outset, the sense of separation from her Irish family and community is powerfully conveyed as a ship pulls away and the look of final farewell on the faces: To leave your country often meant forever.

Arriving in Brooklyn she stays in a rooming house for young women run by a tough but fair matriarch, amusingly played by Julie Walters.  

She finds work in a retail store. But her heart is heavy.  Each night Ellis goes back to her lonely room and reads letters from home.  The priest reminds her that homesickness is indeed a sickness and like other ailments time will heal it. To get out and keep herself busy she does charity work with the church on the weekend, feeding the homeless and abandoned. By the way it's not bad to see Priests and the Catholic church get a positive role in this film with their compassion and charity work. They’ve had such a well deserved kicking lately we forget that they have actually done some good in the community too.

The other girls in the boarding house, get Ellis to come dancing with them on Saturday nights, and through this she meets a fine young man. A romance blooms and all seems set for a rosy future.   
But a tragedy in the family means she has to return to Ireland for a short while. When she arrives back in her home town it’s not just the warmth, security and sense of identity that overwhelms Ellis - it’s also the unexpected attraction she feels for a man who she had not even noticed before.

I won’t tell you how it works out, but the telling of this story is very moving, quite convincing, and very funny.  Nick Hornby knows how to move you or crack you up with just a few lines.

Oh, and  if you're interested, the director of Brooklyn is someone called John Crowley. Getting a Nick Hornby script is a big responsibility for a relatively unknown director.  He’s done well.