Not-Aimed-At-Me Watch: Brooklyn (2015)

Watched:  01/22/205

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Crowley

About ten minutes into Brooklyn (2015) I knew I wasn't the intended audience, or even an intended tertiary audience, for the movie.  I believe this was aimed at Not-Me, whomever that would be - perhaps Bizarro League, and/ or people whose flights of fancy involved less in the way of aliens with capes and/ or atomic-powered giant monsters.  Maybe this is more for folks looking for (melo)drama in the way of Jane Austen novels.  And for them, I say - enjoy!  Stop reading now.

Saoirse Ronan is everything you've heard, and the photography was excellent.  The movie is beautifully made, exquisitely acted, and has immaculate period detail and design.  

And I wasn't into it.

SPOILERS

The basic gist is less a "coming of age" story and more a "coming into her own" story, but I'd argue that the last third or quarter of the film kind of don't pull off the trick.  

I am aware I am alone in this stance.  The movie was an Oscar contender for Best Picture.

Narratives are an argument.  You're building a case for why you've reached your ending, and why that ending satisfies the character's journey for the viewer.  Some of these are easy.  That invading bad guy is bad, but so are some domestic challenges, and by figuring out one, we can solve the other.  Some are more complex.  How do we choose a Pope?  And what will we learn about ourselves, the frailties of man, and the church along the way?

I'm not sure Brooklyn's narrative builds a case so much as it relates a series of events happening to someone.  

For the first... hour?  I hung with the meandering plot wherein Our Hero leaves for America during the post-WWII years.  She struggles with homesickness, loosens up and Americanizes (my experience with Irish folks is not that they need to chill out more, but okay).  It's jokey and fun.  I'll argue - as an immigrant experience movie, or one about women seeking a path, this is not novel.  

I am aware this is a movie about a young woman with a foot in two worlds, feeling the attraction to both after leaving Ireland and landing a job and life in mid-20th Century Brooklyn.  And, of course, finding love.  Only to (way later in the movie's runtime than the description on Amazon would suggest) return to Ireland, find it comforting in its way, and have a very eligible man pursuing her for her affections.*  And, of course, this is also a metaphor for her experience with conflicting worlds, which may as well be flashing on the screen at certain key points.

For a character movie, if you asked me who Eilis, Our Hero, was... it would be the sorts of broad generalities that can plague fiction when our hero is wide-eyed and kind and a stand-in for the audience without causing a ruffle.  The challenges she faces are non-specific old-fashionedy social concerns about which we learn little, such as what happens when one trips up.  She falls for the nicest boy in New York - he loves his family, work and baseball.  And Our Hero.  Funny things happen to him.  He has dreams.  He is a Broadway sketch of a 20th Century New Yorker.

How does Our Hero feel with things being different when she returns to Ireland?  We do not know.  No one seems to notice she's different except Jim, I guess.  She will not say.  She falls back into doing what people tell her.  Same as she's done all movie.  Has she grown?  Maybe.  She owns sunglasses.  Symbolic sunglasses.  Does she feel odd taking over parts of Rose's life, but leveled-up?  How does she feel about her mother?  

The decision seems to have been to let the challenges and struggles of Our Hero's story be told largely in subtext, and that's fine.  I got the subtext, but - to me- it felt so typical of any immigrant story, real or imaginary, it worked like texturing rather than the point of the thing.  And that left me with a romance plot that is supposed to be metaphorical, but is also very concrete.  I believe in show don't tell, and this movie felt like it didn't want to tell, and was being a lot precious about showing much more than Ronan's open expression.

This is a movie with about an hour and forty-five minute runtime that spends more than an hour setting up a life that leads to a romance and new life for Ronan's character, has her get married, and then - like a co-ed who has gone to Europe for a semester, speedily hooks her up with a dude who is at her travel destination.  Yes, there is much about her feelings of comfort and the life she would have liked to have lived in Ireland and the temptations there - but a few lines about that expressed by Our Hero would have been... interesting?   Nice?  Doesn't happen.  We are given subtext.

Puzzlingly, the movie does nothing to really explain why Our Hero doesn't tell anyone about her marriage, the act which establishes the conflict (surprisingly late in the film).  It's a choice, and one I could support as a viewer if it felt like it was motivated beyond "mother might make a face".  Why  would mother make a face? We must guess.  Based on subtext.

Nor does the film tell you why Eilis makes her choice that resolves the movie.  Ie: I have almost no idea why she went back to America.  She seemed fine in Ireland, and like she had more to lose going back - and she seemed to have forgotten all about dear, sweet, dumb Tony in the interim.

Did a chance conversation between people she barely knows, random as a lightning strike, really end it for her?  Her ex-boss does remind Our Hero she is actually married, something easy enough to deny.  But her response is to flee back to America.  (Triumphantly return to America?  I don't know.)  Leaving her ailing mother behind to fend for herself.  The end.  What would have happened if her former boss began gossiping?  We don't know, because we don't know who knows her, if they matter, etc...  Is the town gossipy?  Are there ramifications?  I think if you lift up that subtext over there, you might find an answer under the other layer of subtext.

By this point, refusing to let Ronan's character say things makes it feel like a very fancy meal with one of those big plates with a tiny fish filet sitting in the middle and you're wondering if that's it.  Sure, it's well crafted, and pretty, but... maybe more fish is good, too?

My feeling is that this is one of those cases that the book explained a whole lot of what was going on, and the movie forgot some of us didn't read the book.  I was unsurprised how many reviews I clicked on that loved the movie had mention of the differences from the book, indicating the reviewer read the novel.  Knowing its explained in the book is not helpful.

Ronan is a good actor, but staring into middle-distance is not narrative or character information.  But the movie believes this is cinema.

Brooklyn chooses to conclude by flexing some real main-character-energy.  

As I say, Ronan ditches her ailing mother, who more or less asks to never see her daughter again - I guess choosing to just wither and die so her daughter may be free, which Our Hero is cool with.  Does the mother have an income?  How will she live?  I assumed Rose was caring for her.  

Poor Jim, the local Irish guy, is left with a folded thank-you note from Our Hero - and the movie carefully avoids showing him actually reacting to the news, much less the way it was delivered.  We know nothing of how her friends in Ireland react to her marriage or her ghosting them after essentially lying all summer.  And, of course, after not getting any letters for months, Brooklyn Tony is all "gee, shucks, I'm so glad to see you!" when Ronan re-appears.  

Friends, if this dude doesn't know his wife was up to shenanigans, God help him for the next several decades. He is the guy who comes to college Freshman year whose girlfriend from home is suddenly real busy when he calls and he's the only one who hasn't figured it out.  

My point is - opportunity for real character moments, challenges that don't boil down to a quiet young woman being uncertain, don't come up a whole lot.  Treating everyone else like they're obstacles only works if you explain *why* they're an obstacle.  We know more about Our Hero's mean boss than we know about Rose or her mother.  I don't know how they felt, why Eilis seems to have a bad relationship with her mom... maybe?  I don't know why Jim is suddenly smitten.  I don't know why Rose wasn't a viable candidate.

BTW, to make sure our audience doesn't turn on Our Hero, yes, they keep the romance with Irish Jim chaste.  

At the end of the day, I think there's a difference between "this movie did a thing" (ie: lyrically wove a tale of the immigrant experience, immigrant's longing for home, and a romance) and "this movie executed flawlessly on that audacious plan".  I'll argue it did a thing, and that's good.  I don't think the ending works unless you're only invested in Our Hero and everyone else is an NPC.   

I am sure I will get angry remarks or people telling me "well she did that because of X" or "she did it because of Y", and I can guess, too.  This is not a story that required ambiguity of purpose, but seemed to relish the notion of Our Hero being buffeted along by fate, unable to do more than experience what was happening to her.  Which makes for an odd viewing experience.  

Maybe in the superhero glut of 2015, we were so starved for anything that felt like a character-driven flick that Brooklyn felt like An Important Movie, and with a rising star like Ronan, it just felt great to reviewers.  I suspect for many, the breath of fresh-air that was the film just being about what it was - a and not about Infinity Stones or some nonsense, that it had a sort of late-20th Century period-piece charm to it, and it featured crowd-pleasing topics like the immigrant experience to give it weight (maybe an odd topic given our current political policies) made it a good sell.  

I'm not mad at the movie, and if this is your jam, I'm sorry.  I wouldn't say that nothing in the movie clicked for me, but I might say I just wasn't overly enamored with Our Hero and wasn't sure why watching a character to whom things happen, but she seems to take no actions herself - and when she finally does, it seems for the flimsiest of reasons - wasn't very satisfying.  And yet, I know people love this.  So, carry on.  

* It's interesting to me that "I must choose between two-lovers" is such a staple of romance and melodrama in narratives with a female lead, but I think Archie and maybe Spider-Man comics are the only place I'm aware of where a dude picking between women throwing themselves at a dude is standard practice and not considered gross.

Someday we shall unpack what exactly is happening in Riverdale with the teens, but I don't think it makes anyone look good