Brooklyn is a beautiful and powerful movie. It’s the story of Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), a young Irish woman who arrives in mid-20th century Brooklyn to begin a new life. She’s left behind a mother, a devoted older sister, and a small town in County Wexford that feels too small for the life she wants to create. After an initial bout of homesickness, she has a remarkably good first year in Brooklyn, where she rents a room in a boarding house and starts a job at an upscale department store. Thanks to a kindly priest, she has the tuition for a bookkeeping course in night school. Then one day, at a parish dance, she meets Tony, a sweet Italian charmer with an eye for Irish girls. They fall in love—and then the plot turns. The sudden death of her sister brings Eilis back to Ireland, where she faces a dilemma that forms the crux of the film. Should she stay in her beloved Ireland—where her mother is now aging alone—or should she return to her life in America, the life she has begun to love.
Brooklyn, based on Colm Toibin’s novel, touched me deeply. It goes back to a time half a century ago or more when a labor-needy US welcomed a huge number of immigrants—no background checks required. The film’s protagonist embodies one of thousands of young Irish who emigrated during a spike in unemployment at home. Most went to the London or other places in the UK, but a good number came here, passing through the same Ellis Island where my own maternal grandparents arrived more than 100 years ago.
The art, more than the history of the film, shaped my response. Brooklyn has top-notch acting, a well-adapted screenplay, beautiful photography, and excellent direction. A friend of mine who follows the Oscars, bets this one will get it’s share of Academy Award nominations; it’s already a film festival favorite. It’s the subject matter, though, that made the film so powerful for me. Brooklyn is an immigration story that is relevant to all of us who leave our hometowns to make lives in other places. What is the nature of the life left unchosen? What is the cost of leaving it behind?
There is no real doubt about the choice Eilis will finally make, but the film does present a choice. It’s the choice every immigrant faces—at least those with the option to return home: to continue making a life in a new and promising though unfamiliar world or to remain in a world where one is known and loved. Things looks different when Eilis returns home for her sister’s funeral. The limited life she had foreseen in Ireland before she emigrated seems different now. She has been offered her sister’s old job, the landscape seems open and uncrowded, and most crucially, she connects with Jim, a shy young man who wants to see more of the world and of her. She comes to like him a great deal. Jim also has prospects—the large house and family business (a pub) his parents are leaving behind, and he is clearly getting ready to propose. Her mother wants her to stay. It looks like she might. But then an encounter with a mean-spirited former employer reminds her of why she left in the first place: the petty cruelties of gossip and social control in this small town, the future life that could be finer than the one she once envisioned, but limited all the same.
As a 3rd-generation descendant of immigrants (from Poland and Ireland), I should have had no issues with the choice the protagonist makes in this film. On feminist grounds if nothing else. A look at Irish history circa 1950 almost no job opportunities for women. And a powerful and restrictive Catholic Church made life there much worse for women who transgressed social norms. The films Philomena (2013) and The Magdalene Sisters (2002) come to mind here. Watching Brooklyn, I should have been cheering for the protagonist’s return to the possibilities of freedom. Yet, I wasn’t. I sat there during Eilis’ stay in Ireland, silently willing her to stay there—until it was clear she could not.
A few thoughts of Eilis’ future started flitting through my mind. Success, we know, won’t depend on the choice of place alone. The key involves the very specific people and experiences that populate it. In New York, Eilis could well be part of a fun-loving Italian family, the wife of a man who loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and had big plans to start a construction business on undeveloped Long Island. We can imagine a happy life filled with family and financial security. Or not. It was the 1950s after all. Would she disappear into the kitchen, while Tony and his brothers watched baseball and ran the show? Would the sweet young man who adored her stay true? As the decades passed, would she see Ireland grow and prosper while America’s problems seemed to multiply? Would she bring her mother to live with her—or would her mother insist on finishing her life in Ireland? Would Eilis ever see her mother again and would that matter to her when she became old? Conversely, would life necessarily be so limited if this spirited girl married Jim? Perhaps they’d travel together or move to London or do something else that neither could envision at the time. Her mum would likely become a grandmother who knew her grandkids. Or not. Pub work could lead to alcoholism, and life in Wexford could become lonely or bitter. The future remains remains hidden, not yet created. No doubt this uncertainty is why choices can be so wrenching, especially when we’re young. We don’t know how they’ll turn out. We can only guess and hope. The screenplay leads us to see that Eilis was making the best guess possible.
It took me awhile to realize that in watching Eilis in Ireland, I was reviewing and mourning the places I had left behind. The character of Eilis in Brooklyn was taking me back into my own un-lived life choices. Good movies can do that—draw us in and make us a part of a parallel story.
I left Chicago for Colorado when I was 27. Somewhat like Eilis, I had lost sight of how to build a life in my hometown. Moving to Colorado brought a new set of freedoms for me—a chance to live outside of Chicago for the first time, to test my mettle in a new place—a beautiful place, where I quickly took to hiking and backpacking and exploring The West. Though I missed my family and friends, I made new ones over time. I got a job in Denver, a city that was starting to develop from cowtown to metropolis. Then a year after I moved, my father died. I returned for the funeral but did not stay. No one expected that I would. Years passed. I was part of a vibrant feminist community, I had a partner, a job, and then after 4 years of night classes at the University of Colorado at Denver, a master’s degree in education with a specialty in teaching English as a second language. After struggling with the job market and a changing relationship with my partner, I went to Japan for a year or two to live and work. It was exhilarating to live in such a very different culture, working in a field I had trained for. That year stretched into many more—20, and during that time my mother passed away. I came back for the funeral and then returned to Japan. Paula, my former partner, died a year before I left Japan and returned to Colorado.
I can imagine the fictional Eilis looking back on her life in America when she was an old woman, content that she had made the right choice by following her heart and instincts. But I’m guessing she would also mourn the loss of her unlived life in Ireland, her separation from her mother and the relationships that might have been nurtured there. As do I, though the feelings are never quite in balance. On some days the mourning washes over the contentment. On others, it’s the reverse. And on still others, I just accept the past and wade into the future—wondering and hoping.
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