Brooklyn, the 2009 novel by Colm Tóibín, is great. It’s the sort of book anyone can pick up and enjoy. Set in 1951, it tells of a young woman’s immigration to the States and the subtle transition she undergoes in a city far from home. Brooklyn, the film adaptation by Nick Horny and directed by relative newcomer John Crowley, is not. With its calculated score and glossy sets, the film bears no resemblance to reality. It’s the American Doll version of U.S. History. Lacking Tóibín’s narrative grace and attention to detail, the film is sorely disappointing and often boring, doing little to reflect what makes Brooklyn like no other place in the world.
Irish actress Saoirse Ronan is Eilis, the blue-eyed ingénue who leaves her small town in Ireland and sets off, with some hesitation, for the land of opportunity. After the requisite tear-stained goodbye, given from the deck of a ship made of what appears to be plastic, Eilis is on her own. She shares a cabin with a spicy, older woman who teaches her how to wear lipstick because becoming an American woman is obviously akin to looking like a Maybelline ad.
The film jumps ahead to the ship’s unbelievably seamless arrival in New York, and Eilis gazes at the skyline, which has all the magic of a 10 cent postcard. She’s set up in a rooming house run by an older Irish woman played by the fantastic Julie Walters. If only Brooklyn could be remade into 90 minutes of Walters delivering her acerbic declarations about God and dating.
As a protagonist, Eilis is nice, intelligent and dull as a baked potato. She’s the sort of bland female character that could only have been written by a man. The portrayal of her life is like a series of “Best of” clips, and Hornby skips over all the emotional complexity and sense of place that a story like Brooklyn deserves. With the help of kindly priest (Jim Broadbent), Eilis is hired as a sales clerk at a department store. In the book, the descriptions of her work are a fascinating window into a detailed microcosm of class and consumerism. In the film, Crowley shows Eilis nervous on her first day and, then (surprise), confident one year later. She’s also studying to be an account, and the scenes of her bookkeeping are, well, not the most riveting.
At the boardinghouse, Eilis shares her meals with a table of women whose personalities blend into a blob of estrogen. They attend local Irish dances, and their primary goal is attracting the attention of eligible men. The arrival of a quirky new girl (Jenn Murray) provides comic relief, but she’s gone as soon as she arrives, replaced by Tony (Emory Cohen), the Italian plumber with a heart of gold. Eilis and Tony couple up overnight and, in what professes to be the movie’s central dilemma, Eilis has to choose between Tony and Jim (Domhnall Gleeson), the responsible Irish boy who lives back home.
Long before the co/ops and yoga studios took over, Brooklyn was an epicenter of urbanization. In the mid-20th century, the population had soared with immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia and Poland. It’s a terrific locus of history, and none if it makes it into the film. Instead, Hornby, who proved his screenwriting skills with last year’s Wild, delivers a paltry script and cast of stock characters.
In the book, Eilis’ homesickness is moving. Tóibín writes, “She was nobody here…It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor…Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty.” Coincidentally, “false and empty” sounds a lot like Brooklyn.
