Saorise Ronan stars in a scene from the movie Brooklyn.
It's hardly surprising that stories of immigrants to the Land of the Free have such a proud cinematic history: the immigrant experience has everything - risk, longing, regret, hope, danger - that makes for great drama.
It also plugs directly into America's founding myth, which may explain Brooklyn's three Oscar
nominations. But it's odd that, with all the writing firepower on board - Nick Hornby adapts Colm Toibin - the movie lacks any semblance of a dramatic pulse.
Director Crowley, a theatre veteran, has created a stagey sanitised love story that's like Mills & Boon without the bodice-ripping. This bland Brooklyn is as gritty as Singing in the Rain's Los Angeles, a scene-painter's chocolate box version, rather than a place teeming with noisy, smelly life.
Toibin's 2009 novel, which I have not read, attracted praise from reviewers for its control and understatement in a portrait of a woman growing up. But a character's turmoil - all internal in a novel - has to be shown on screen; we wait an age for that to happen here and when it does, it's hard not to feel exasperated.
As the film opens, it's 1952 and Eilis Lacey (Ronan) is having America delivered to her on a plate: the local priest in her County Wexford home town sponsors her passage to New York where, under the eye of another man of the cloth (Broadbent), she is given in short order a home, a job and a night school class.
