An abridged version of Jeffrey Overstreet’s review of In America is available at Paste Magazine.
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Directed by Jim Sheridan; written by Mr. Sheridan, Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan; director of photography, Declan Quinn; edited by Naomi Geraghty; music by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer; production designer, Mark Geraghty; produced by Mr. Sheridan and Arthur Lappin; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
103 minutes. Rated PG-13 for foul language, an (exemplary) sex scene, and a few moments of threatened violence.
STARRING: Samantha Morton (Sarah), Paddy Considine (Johnny), Djimon Hounsou (Mateo), Sarah Bolger (Christy) and Emma Bolder (Ariel).
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Jim Sheridan’s In America is a personal memoir and a family saga, a realistic and yet imaginative fish-out-of-water story, a testimony of the hard work it takes to keep a family together in hard times, and a celebration of childlike wonder. Avoiding any kind of indulgence, it tells a story of mourning and of dancing. This is a story about small children forced to contend with adult-sized problems, and of adults forced to reckon with the power of childlike faith. It’s about immigration, AIDS, art, parenting, pregnancy, a child’s fears of losing a parent, the discipline of acting, and the existence and nature of God.
Hang on-I’m just getting started.
The film also presents us with a true cinematic rarity: an admirable married couple that is convincingly strong, convincingly flawed, complex, and … yes … sexy. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to think of another recent film that demonstrates family life in such an honest and yet appealing manner.
Dare I add September 11 to the mix? While it does not directly relate to the events of the World Trade Center bombings, the film’s focus on loss in the heart of New York makes the film resonant and relevant to the city’s wounded state. In Sheridan’s narrative about lost loved ones, lost security, lost faith and lost identity, we have a vital story of spiritual healing and renewal in Manhattan’s broken heart.
And yet, while the film brings all of these things to mind, the strongest impression which lingered after my first viewing of the film was laughter: healthy, hearty, joyous laughter. Whereas the other acclaimed year-end dramas of 2003-Mystic River and 21 Grams-let their emotional burdens bury any hope for humor and warmth, In America is alive with laughter and uplift,
all of it well earned.
Also, In America outdoes those two films with its attractive and colorful cinematography (Mystic River was bland and dreary. 21 Grams was cast in the dispiriting colors of mold and fungi). The film’s intimate nature is enhanced by poetic imagery captured by the versatile cinematographer Declan Quinn, who filmed Mira Nair’s wondrous Monsoon Wedding, Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas, and gave us close-up access to the actors in Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street. Quinn and Sheridan do here for Manhattan what Stephen Frears and Chris Menges did for London in Dirty Pretty Things; they avoid familiar and distracting postcard images and immerse us instead in a particular neighborhood.
Jim Sheridan is an Irishman through and through. Though he moved his family to New York in the ’80s and has lived there ever since, he remains a storyteller preoccupied with the dilemma of Ireland’s divided soul. All of his films have explored in vivid and memorable ways the chasm between Catholic and Protestant; between wounded Ireland and a possible future. My Left Foot brought to life the sufferings and inspiring spirit of the painter and poet Christie Brown, and introduced many viewers to the formidable talents of Daniel Day-Lewis. In the Name of the Father delivered more Oscar-worthy performances by Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite in a story about IRA bombings and the wrongfully accused Gerry Conlon. Into the West, which Sheridan wrote and Mike Newell directed, remains a sorely underrated family adventure film, in which two Irish boys discover a mythical horse and run from the pain of a lost parent. The Boxer focuses on the efforts of one man to bring warring factions together in a community endeavor.
Now, he just may have his masterpiece in a semi-autobiographical account of a family who has left Ireland, haunted by the death of a loved one trying to make a new start in the States. While the family members are not directly based on his own family, Sheridan’s characters clearly reflect his firsthand experience with similarly rugged emotional territory.
Johnny and Sarah are hard-working parents and hard-loving spouses. (For a change, a movie suggests that love is not about getting something from someone else, but rather about sacrificing for another’s sake.) Their daughters are Christy (Sarah Bolger), a melancholy contemplative, and Ariel (Emma Bolger), a spirited 7-year-old who asks the right questions that her parents need to hear. Bedraggled and broken, they arrive in Manhattan with very few dollars and enormous dreams.
Johnny (Paddy Considine) is an actor, and he quickly goes to work auditioning for a part that will help them pay the bills. Sarah (Samantha Morton) is his consolation; as he tries to steady their rocking boat, she tries to steady his volatile temper. They amuse themselves by trying to dress up a dilapidated apartment in a ghetto building full of junkies and memorable strangers. It is, of course, inevitable that they will have to reckon with the muscular artist who lives behind a door marked KEEP AWAY: Matteo (Djimon Hounsou), whose personal torments earn him the nickname “The Screaming Man.”
Through close attention to detail, Sheridan draws suspense and humor from the emotional journeys of each character. Johnny grapples with his anger and grief over the loss of a family member, and he does so by obsessing over the family’s practical needs. Considine, who comes across as a formidable talent, makes Johnny a man whose feverish dedication to survival and family is at once endearing and alarming, especially as he becomes increasingly blind to the impact his anger has upon his children.
Sarah is wrestling too, but in a much quieter way, burying her true feelings behind a forced performance of happiness for the sake of her children. Samantha Morton brings the same intensity to the character that she brought to “the pre-cog” in Minority Report and to the lead role in Morvern Callar. Just as she did in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown, she commands our attention even in a crowd, saying very little, letting us glimpse deep wells of emotion through cracks in her smiling and deceptively giddy veneer.
If Sarah is introspective, her daughter Christy is more so. Christy narrates the film; her perspective is a mix of childlike faith and the intensifying questions of grown-up doubt. We see through her eyes and through her camcorder, which she uses to document many of the family’s important moments, a device that increases the film’s journal-entry qualities. As the story is told through her, it is startling when she steps out from behind her observant pose and suddenly unloads her own feelings, her own frustrations and loss. Eleven-year-old Sarah Bolger gives the quietest performance in the film, but it in hindsight it burns just as intensely. (Keep an eye on this actress. She can act and sing: Her mid-film solo is a moving rendition of a most unlikely cover.)
Through it all, Christy’s younger sister Ariel, played by Sarah’s younger sister Emma, skips like a guardian angel, her innocence humbling her parents and neighbors, her questions naïve and yet profound, her spirit undimmed by loss. Emma Bolger’s performance is the most astonishing by a young girl since the brilliant turn by Victoire Thivisol in Ponette. The two sisters play and interact so convincingly, they keep the film buoyant and engaging in spite of its heavy load of angst and anger. When they set out trick-or-treating on their very first Halloween experience, they create a deliciously suspenseful and rewarding scene.
As Matteo, the solitary artist, Djimon Hounsou comes to the family like a threat. But the miracle of the girls’ presence in his life brings about a change that ends up affecting all of them deeply. As a castoff from his own family due to the nature of his torment, he becomes a sort of surrogate son, in spite of the fact that he towers over them.
Before things get better, though, they get worse. There are two debilitating crises that require medical attention, events that reopen recent wounds and throw fuel on the flames of their fears. There are financial problems that make us cringe. One character makes a troubling confession of lost faith, a problem that remains rather unresolved at the end of the film (which I’m sure will disappoint some religious press critics who want every film to end with the resolution of all doubt). Nothing becomes predictable, though. Nothing feels implausible. For a few moments, I feared that the movie was headed for a suspenseful scene of theatre auditions, in which Dad has to act his heart out and win the big role in order to save his family from financial and physical ruin. But Sheridan is far too smart and ambitious to trivialize the film in that way.
The film ends on a note that lacks resolution. We can see the beginnings of healing, but there is also an honesty about doubt. At one point, Christy admits her own frustrations with God by admitting that her private prayer-like conversations with the lost family member ended when, as she puts it, “I realized I was talking to myself.” In America does not end with an exhortation that “His eye is on the sparrow” or that “All things work together for good.”
However, it does allow for the possibility that there might be a Higher Power working to bring grace and healing if we can bring ourselves to own up to our grief and anger. In fact, it suggests that only by releasing such hidden frustration can our lungs find air to breathe again. It also indicates that by blessing those who are foreign, or even frightening, to us-by embracing them with childlike faith-we create a larger space for love and grace to do a work that blesses us all.
While other artists fill their dramas with angst, anger, and a bleak sense of determinism, Jim Sheridan has given us one that stares the scary questions in the face, admits that it cannot answer all of them, and yet offers glimmers of hope and a generous helping of uplifting humor. Go: laugh, cry, and savor it … a few times, if you can.