REVIEW: Brooklyn (2015)

Brooklyn comes with all the bells and whistles of a major Hollywood production, but underneath its classical trappings, its score and its range of veteran character actors credited under ‘with’ and ‘and’, the film is refreshingly simple and personal.

The film begins in Enniscorthy in Wexford in 1950, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is a young woman in her twenties with no prospects in her home town. She has decided to go to America in an effort to find a better life. She moves to Brooklyn with the help of her sister Rose (Fiona Glascott) and friendly priest Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). Suffering initially from homesickness, Eilis finds love in an Italian-American Tony (Emory Cohen) and manages to make the big city feel like home. However, a tragedy forces her back to Ireland and she begins to question the meaning of home.

Brooklyn is an old-fashioned story and its handling here feels very much like a throwback to classical Hollywood. John Crowley’s direction is all stately, well-framed shots and slow, ruminative tracking shots – a bit of a surprise considering the jerky, nervy Intermission. Indeed, everything from the direction to the costumes, the score and the tame humour adds to this impression. And as an old-fashioned romance tearjerker, it works quite well, moving along at a decent pace, tightening the screws with only an element of manipulation. The romance between Eilis and Tony and Eilis and Irishman Jim (Domhnall Gleeson) are pleasing without being overly convincing. The romances here falter from a feeling of narrative convenience in some stretches, rather than a natural character development. However, this hurdle is overcome by the sincerity of the performances. Ronan goes for quiet and subtle throughout, which works quite well and is a pleasant surprise in a film released towards a particular season. Julie Walters and Broadbent do great work in little character roles. Cohen and Gleeson suffer a little from under-written characters, but their performances are very good.  

As an adaptation, it flounders at certain stretches trying to fit in too many nuances that may work better in prose, often to the detriment of other moments that don’t get the time they deserve. The two central romances never totally seem right – both develop too quickly and inevitably to be wholly recognisable. This is not as much of a problem as it may seem, since the film’s clear focus is on Eilis herself and not on her romances. However the film falters in other ways. Late in the film, Eilis cannot seem to decide if she should remain in Ireland with Jim or go back to Brooklyn and Tony. We know that the Ireland and Jim option will not be chosen, having been given so pervasive a sense of a community conspiring to keep her there that all, even Jim, are appear suspect. But when she does decide to return to Tony, it seems as much to do with a bad run in with the evil Miss Kelly (played by Brid Brennan on slight material) than her independence or her love for Tony.

Where the film does work very well is as a tale of Irish emigration, of leaving one home and trying to make a new home of a confusing new place. This is where Ronan particularly shines – in quiet scenes, often alone, she creates a three-dimensional character who is confused and contradictory, happy and sad, nervous and excited, but always with an inner confidence and strength. Her performance holds the film together.

A poignant and traditional story of a young woman emigrating and making a home for herself, Brooklyn is a moving, funny and likable film. Though the film is a little light on development, it will stay in the mind for its heart-breaking examination of emigration, its avoidance of ‘big’ scenes and a great central performance. It’s also quite nice to hear a bit of Gaeilge in such a wide release.

REVIEW: Frank (2014)

Is it easier to make a ‘fun’ film than a dark and serious one? And if a filmmaker is good at making a particular type of film, is it a bad thing for them to try something new, to take a risk and make something totally unlike anything that they have done before. As with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master – or, at least, as it appears – is the weight of expectation sometimes just too much for a working filmmaker to bear? In my review of What Richard Did, I wrote that Lenny Abrahamson was “Ireland’s most important living filmmaker.” A big statement and, on balance, a deeply unhelpful one – isn’t it better after all to have a range of interesting voices than a single “most important” one? Whether Abrahamson was afraid of being typecast – I suppose directors can be typecast too – as the director of low budget dark dramas or he just wanted to have fun, the result is Frank – one of this year’s most pointless films.

Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is trying to get into music but he doesn’t really have all that much talent. He ends up joining a band, the unpronounceable Soronprfbs, headed by Frank – a damaged man in a giant papier-mâché head (played by Michael Fassbender). No one else in the band (including Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, François Civil and Carla Azar) likes Jon very much. They go to Ireland and live in a remote cabin for almost a year in order to record an album. Jon films the process on his phone and his videos become popular on Youtube, which thrusts the band into the limelight. But are they ready for it?

Some have said that Frank is the kind of film that half the audience will love and the other half will hate, though that is overly simplistic. Some certainly seem to love it and others will certainly hate it, but my own reaction was merely initial disappointment followed by boredom. For me, it was deeply uninteresting, it wasn’t funny or engaging. It is one of those heavily ironic films that seem to enjoy their own company – not unlike Wes Anderson films – and smugly disregard the audience, secure in the knowledge that someone somewhere will love it and be vocal enough about it to make it a cult film. Frank is one of those films that will be trendy and might even be talked about in almost religious terms twenty years from now – like The Big Lebowski is today. All the naysayers who saw it when it came out and who didn’t get it will be stuck with some kind of old conservative label – their reviews quoted ironically in the same way that Pauline Kael’s negative review of Star Wars is now a T-shirt. All of that sounds bitter so suffice it to say that Frank is one of those films that has nothing much to say about anything, doesn’t go anywhere interesting and doesn’t bother to make you care.

Those who will love Frank have probably already made up their minds about going to see it, though I wonder if Lenny Abrahamson was the deciding factor for many of them. It is probably just as well because there is very little of what made Abrahamson’s previous work so good. There are no interesting characters. The comedy falls flat and the drama is only semi-successful at the very end of the film, in which the re-formed Sonorprfbs play one last song as Jon looks on. It is a decent conclusion to a film that spent the previous ninety minutes wondering around, looking for an idea and a point. Ultimately, the film is about how we tend to deify artists, how fandom (and social media) can exaggerate aspects of an artist’s life and work beyond all proportion – Kurt Cobain is a good example as is (I suppose) calling Lenny Abrahamson “Ireland’s most important living filmmaker.” So Frank, then, is an intentionally poor film designed to make Abrahamson’s life a little easier. Maybe. Probably not. But Frank leaves you with very little else to think about.

For me, music films don’t tend to work. You probably have to be in a band or at least have some kind of ambition in that direction to fully appreciate Almost Famous (its just OK) or that other terrible film now gaining a cult following (these days films don’t wait twenty years to become rediscovered gems) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Frank has nothing interesting in it and it isn’t as funny or as emotionally involving as it might think it is – assuming any thought went into it whatsoever. Taken as a whole, it is just gibberish, unfocused and annoying. It isn’t a film I hate, it’s just one that did absolutely nothing for me. Which is a pity because I really like Lenny Abrahamson’s other films – whether they are millstones or not.