Finding home and self in Brooklyn

It would be simple to begin summarizing Brooklyn’s story here but that would rob future viewers of a special experience.  Having worked on an extensive personal genealogy, I was often struck by the number of children, men and women, that emigrated alone,  from their homeland, in order to find a better life than their family had.  Brooklyn is such a story.

With beautiful imagery, a stirring score, great camerawork, and all topped off with some really moving acting, Brooklyn is a nostalgic dreamlike experience.  There is an excellent use of color.  The color palettes change as the circumstances of Eilis’s life change.  The combination of the colors and music could tell a story on their own.  Themes include sacrifice, guilt, maturing, romance, homesickness and finding where you belong.  So much of the emotion in this film is conveyed not by words but by the faces of the actors.  From the lead characters to a group of Irish laborers enjoying Christmas dinner at the church, the eyes have it.  Sadness, twinkling, loneliness, yearnign for times past and pure joy are all found in the framing of the faces.  These are drawn out by the use of a lot of soft focus and central framing.

The story occurs in the early 1950s but as a viewer I never felt I was back in the time but rather that I was experiencing a detailed flashback.  There is a saying that “You cannot go back home”.  Once you have grown up, and been out into the wide world, “home” will not be the same place it was when you left. So much so that it will no longer be “home” to you any more than any other place you live.  It sometimes takes a while and a return trip to realize this.  Eilis takes that trip and at the end has no doubt in her mind where she belongs.