Movie Review: Ammonite (2020)

Genre: Romantic Drama  

Director: Francis Lee  

Starring: Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, James McArdle  

Running Time: 117 minutes  

Synopsis: The setting is the small English seaside village of Lyme Regis in the 1840s. Fossil collector Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) runs a small shop with her mother Molly (Gemma Jones), and spends her days on the beach looking for geological artefacts. Mary is single and never received recognition in a male-dominated profession. Her mood is further soured when she is asked to care for the ailing Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), a neglected wife recovering from a miscarriage while her husband (James McArdle) travels in Europe. But gradually, romance blossoms between Mary and Charlotte.

What Works Well: A historical fiction story constructed around real characters, this romantic drama uses sparse words and focuses on a sense of time and place. Director Francis Lee conveys a tough existence within a rustic village ambience, Mary in her element on windswept beaches and relishing the muddy work of finding and extracting fossils. With Mary overlooked by her profession and Charlotte ignored by her husband, the romance unfurls with tenderness, two women finding passion in the absence of respect.  

What Does Not Work As Well: The pacing is glacial and the mood uniformly dour - smiles less common than precious archeological finds. The focus on a fictional romance rather than Mary's professional achievements and struggles is a dubious narrative decision.

Key Quote:

Charlotte: You look after me like your child. You don't have any?

Mary: What a lot of questions. I might have preferred it when you were unconscious.

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Movie Review: The Outrun (2024)

Genre: Drama 

Director: Nora Fingscheidt  

Starring: Saoirse Ronan  

Running Time: 118 minutes  

Synopsis: The story unfolds in two timelines. In the flashbacks, Rona (Saoirse Ronan) is a college student in London. She neglects her studies, moves in with her boyfriend, slips into a lifestyle of partying, and succumbs to alcoholism. In the present, Rona has moved back home to the remote and rugged Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, where she reconnects with her separated mother and father. She secures a low-stress bird preservation job, but the urge to drink is never far away.

What Works Well: The beauty of the Orkney Islands provides a spectacular and unique backdrop for an otherwise standard journey of healing. Saoirse Ronan is magnetic in her portrayal of a young woman who has lost her way, and now experiencing her parents' dysfunction (mom has surrendered to religion, dad is bipolar) in a new light. Recovery passes through nature and solitude, but only after the desire to reclaim control emerges from the wreckage.

What Does Not Work As Well: This is a small human drama occupying limited emotional space, with barely sufficient material for 90 minutes. The unnecessary stretching towards two hours results in languid pacing, repetitive notes, and static scenery to obscure the sparse content.

Key Quote:

Rona (narrating): United Kingdom is an island off Europe. Orkney Islands is an island off United Kingdom. Westray is an island off Orkney and Papa Westray is an island off Westray.



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Movie Review: The Way Back (2010)

Genre: Survival Drama

Director: Peter Weir

Starring: Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan, and Colin Farrell

Running Time: 133 minutes

Synopsis: During World War Two, Polish soldier Janusz (Jim Sturgess) is captured by the Soviets and dispatched to a Siberian prison. He meets a mix of political and criminal convicts including grizzled American Mr. Smith (Ed Harris) and scrappy thief Valka (Colin Farrell). Along with other prisoners they escape during a brutal snow storm, heading towards Mongolia. The mysterious Irena (Saoirse Ronan) joins the escapees en route, but the longer-than-expected trek to freedom will be tough to survive.

What Works Well: Inspired by actual events, this is a grim and determined battle for survival, first against the inhumanity of prison conditions, then trudging through an inhospitable natural environment fluctuating from extreme cold to insufferable heat. The long trip on foot is satisfyingly exhausting to watch, and director Peter Weir teases out character traits and the survivors' strengthening bonds. Russell Boyd's cinematography captures nature's dangerous grandeur.

What Doesn't Work As Well: With a limited - and familiar - thematic ambition of the human spirit yearning to live free or die trying, it's difficult to care too much about any of the characters. The less prominent members of the escape party are predictably lined up to expire. Janusz's flashbacks and hallucinations are flimsy, and the running time need not have competed with the actual duration of the journey.

Conclusion: A sturdy but emotionally parched hazard course navigation adventure.



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Movie Review: Atonement (2007)

A drama and romance with a wartime backdrop, Atonement is a sweeping story of love, jealousy, and the jarring impacts of impulsive behaviour.

In England of 1935, Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) is a precocious 13-year-old living with her older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and their parents at a lavish country estate. An observant aspiring writer, Briony harbours a crush on the housekeeper's well-educated son Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), but he is more interested in pursuing a romance with Cecilia. 

During one wild night, businessman Paul Marshall (Benedict Cumberbatch) is invited to dinner as a potential suitor for Cecilia, while Briony entertains visiting cousins. An explicit love note, an illicit sexual liaison, missing kids, a rape, and a life-changing false accusation follow in quick succession. 

By 1940 Robbie is part of Britain's defeated army in France. He pines for his lost love as he makes his way to the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation. Back in England, Cecilia and Briony join the war effort and live with the consequences of that fateful night.

The Ian McEwan novel is adapted into a lavish yet brash production. Director Joe Wright dazzles with a full toolkit featuring stunning cinematography, razor sharp sound editing, breathtaking sets, a sly Christopher Hampton screenplay, and one slinky green dress. The outcome is a combustible mix of lust, envy, and war, with a cascading series of unfortunate events lighting the fuse.

The highlights are many. Keira Knightley in that dress earns a spot in the Hollywood wardrobe hall of fame. The sex-in-the-library scene is a steamy chapter of overflowing - and interrupted - passion. Robbie's tour of the Dunkirk beach, filmed in one continuous take lasting 5.5 minutes, is a bleak canvass of a defeated army. And Briony's interaction with a wounded French soldier exemplifies the pain inflicted by her actions, but also prods her on the road to redemption.

At the personal character level, Atonement toys with the crucial moments when fate intervenes to forever alter trajectories. The dinner night at the Tallis estate is audacious for the sheer quantity and quality of unexpected events, twists and turns. By the time the police car pulls away, most of the dinner attendees have had their destinies changed. At the grander cosmic scale, Atonement exposes war's massive appetite to consume lives. Robbie's story is known, but that Dunkirk beach is filled with thousands of individual experiences leading to the same time and place. Back home the rich get richer, while the emotionally wounded Cecilia and Briony face their own domestic hell.

The film's style is a triumph of dynamic artistry, with superlative images and sound. Wright deploys the rhythmic clacks of Briony's typewriter to build up tension, complementing visuals rich with symmetry, flashbacks and rewinds that fill gaps or replay scenes from a different perspective.

The cast bring the characters to life with plenty of verve, Saoirse Ronan emerging as the one unavoidable source of coiled tension. Her eyes shine with quiet anger, seething frustration, and rapid scheming, but she also never betrays the innocence of a 13 year old suddenly knocked off her centre by several carnal shocks. Atonement boasts a sleek exterior, but smolders within.



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Movie Review: Little Women (2019)

An adaptation of the classic Louisa May Alcott book, Little Women is a coming-of-age tale with a focus on women carving out identities while grappling with personal and societal expectations and economic realities.

The film unfolds non-linearly across multiple time zones and locations. In simplified form, the March sisters are from a relatively poor Concord, Massachusetts family and growing up in the shadow of the Civil War. Jo (Saoirse Ronan) is fiercely independent and an aspiring writer. Meg (Emma Watson) loves acting and is a romantic at heart. Amy (Florence Pugh) is a painter and wants to marry well. The youngest Beth (Eliza Scanlen) is a talented pianist. With their father (Bob Odenkirk) serving in the war, Marmee (Laura Dern) instills in the girls a strong sense of service and selflessness.

The Marchs are neighbours of the wealthy and kind Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper), whose grandson Theodore (Timothée Chalamet) becomes friends with the sisters and falls in love with Jo. She sets out to seek her fortune as a writer in New York, where she meets publisher Mr. Dashwood (Tracy Letts) and clashes with academic Friedrich Bhaer (Louis Garrel). Amy heads to Paris for a cultural trip with Aunt March (Meryl Streep). Meg marries a struggling tutor and starts a family. But a sickness will pull the sisters back home to confront unexpected futures.

The sixth cinematic adaptation of Alcott's novel, the 2019 version is a sprawling and ambitious effort infused with a feminist edge. Clocking in at an overlong 135 minutes, writer and director Greta Gerwig takes her time to fully define the four sisters as rounded characters, and chases down their dreams, trials and tribulations on the path to womanhood. Along the way the sisters bicker, fight and support each other, all underpinned by warm foundations of familial love.

Gerwig structures the film as a dizzying jumping exercise, restlessly bouncing between various points of history in the lives of the four sisters. As a result Little Women rarely flows, some scenes spending a matter of seconds in one time and place before the next scene leaps to somewhere else with someone else at a different time.

But the fine work of the talented cast and the investment in characters does pay off in the final third, where the sometimes scattered narrative puzzle pieces start to come together. The film achieves poignant peaks of genuine emotion built on the discrete strengths and weaknesses of the March sisters, and Gerwig presents a satisfyingly wide array of personal achievements mixed with shades of disappointments, all built on honest passion.

While the emphasis on feminism is sometimes speechy and jarring, here it means the freedom to choose a future vision to pursue, and to defend that choice. And while no two dreams are alike, the sisters pragmatically understand their future, like their past, involves compromise and is not meant to be perfect. Gerwig also places admirable emphasis on economics as an essential part of future plans. Balancing the romantic pursuit of love, marriage's role as an economic benefit emerges as a theme.

Little Women enjoys stellar production design, the film recreating interiors and exteriors of the mid to late 1800s with an easy sense of place and time. This is a period piece unafraid to march into the open, as the March sisters stride into a post-war world with every intention to help define it.

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Movie Review: I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

A standard romantic comedy, I Could Never Be Your Woman has plenty of incomplete ideas and is predictably unable to cobble together a decent package.

In Los Angeles, Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) is a television producer in her early forties, battling against her age and having conversations with Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman) about the natural order of things. Rosie is divorced from the still amiable Nathan (Jon Lovitz), and raising her precocious daughter Izzie (Saoirse Ronan), who is just entering puberty.

Rosie's tween-oriented female empowerment show You Go Girl is struggling in the ratings, but new young-ish actor Adam (Paul Rudd) has plenty of charisma and gives the show a big boost. Rosie and Adam are attracted to each other and start a relationship, but she is gravely concerned about the age difference between them. Rosie's snarky assistant Jeannie (Sarah Alexander) has her own eyes on Adam, while Izzie is experiencing her first crush on a boy at school.

From the clumsy title to Rosie's corny conversations with Mother Nature, the incessant inside-Hollywood satirical jabs, the flimsy basis for the central relationship and the overall shallow characters, most parts of I Could Never Be Your Woman demonstrate a smidgen of promise but then don't work so well. The film cannot shake the sense that writer and director Amy Heckerling, returning after a seven year hiatus, is trying too hard to assemble a hip movie out of inherently defective parts.

Despite offering a few good laughs, the movie too often busies itself taking cheap shots at the shallow youth-obsessed Los Angeles culture fueling the plastic surgery industry. The Mother Nature interludes are interruptive and mostly twee in tone rather than witty or profound. As a result insufficient time is invested in Rosie and Adam, and they remain stock characters with no meaningful arcs. While Pfeiffer at 49 is radiant playing a character nearly 10 years younger and Rudd adds plenty of amusing free-spirited energy, both deserved a better script.

Jeannie as the perfunctory antagonist suffers most, her character existing for the sole purpose of antagonizing the central romance. It is left to young Saoirse Ronan, in her film debut, to try and rescue proceedings, and she nearly pulls it off. Heckerling saves her best lines for Izzie's character, and while the precocious kid can be a tired cliche, Ronan adds sufficient budding maturity and a droll world weariness to make it work, in the process stealing every scene she's in.

I Could Never Be Your Woman was eventually released straight to DVD in most markets. It's not bad enough to have deserved such a fate, but it's still a film that misses too many of the simple targets it aims for.

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Movie Review: Mary Queen Of Scots (2018)

A historical drama, Mary Queen Of Scots explores the reign of Mary Stuart and her rivalry with England's Queen Elizabeth.

A prologue shows Mary Stuart (Saoirse Ronan), known as Mary Queen of Scots, being marched to her death by beheading in 1587. In flashback to 1561, Mary returns to Scotland from France after the death of her first husband, and claims her rightful throne. Her half-brother the Earl of Moray (James McArdle) was acting as Regent and reluctantly makes way. Protestant leaders are more vocally opposed to Mary's rule, viewing her ties to Catholicism and the Pope with suspicion.

Mary also has a strong claim to the throne of England, but through correspondence signals her willingness to cooperate with the reigning Queen Elizabeth (Margot Robbie) as long as Elizabeth names Mary as her successor. The unmarried and barren Elizabeth is wary of Mary's ambition and threat from any future heirs. Elizabeth attempts to have Mary wed the English Robert Dudley (Joe Alwyn), who is under Elizabeth's control. Mary refuses and marries another Englishman, Lord Darnley (Jack Lowden), but the union triggers further plots against her rule.

Covering ground previously filmed in 1971 with Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, the 2018 version is visually satisfying and more brazenly invades Mary's bedroom and inner sanctum, but otherwise offers a muddled narrative. Directed by Josie Rourke from a Beau Willimon script, the film takes the usual number of liberties with history, including imagining a secret meeting between the two Queens. More troublesome is an unnecessarily deep bow to modern sensibilities by transforming both the Scottish and English courts into bastions of multi-cultural diversity.

But the film's central problem resides in the noble intention of portraying Mary as a benevolent ruler, but then harbouring all the power within the men conspiring around her. The Earl of Moray, Lord Maitland (Ian Hart), Lord Darnley and advisor/musician David Rizzio (Ismael Cruz Córdova) plus another clutch of men surrounding Elizabeth hold all the cards and manipulate events to their liking. Their characters and motivations are reduced to tangential afterthoughts, leaving Mary as a stranded figure buffeted by barely explained intentions.

The one interesting theme ironically emerges in the English court. Elizabeth refuses to consider marriage and refuses to name an heir, thereby protecting her position. Her gradual realization that Mary's femininity and fertility contribute greatly to her weakness and downfall is a reaffirmation of women's weakened status at the time, even when bestowed with the title of monarchs.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie both occupy their roles with conviction. Ronan in particular thrives in portraying a young Queen, not yet 19 years old when she ascended to the throne, caught between the playfulness of a young adult and the responsibilities of ruling. However, the script offers few standout moments or memorable highlights for either actress to truly shine.

Mary Queen Of Scots is competently staged, but also caught between queens on the throne and kingmakers in the shadows.

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Movie Review: Hanna (2011)

A chase thriller, Hanna has a mildly intriguing premise but is an otherwise lacklustre exercise in routine run-and-chase action.

Teenager Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is being brought up in the Arctic wilderness away from any social contact by her father Erik (Eric Bana). He trains her to be a ruthless warrior and an expert in survival and multiple languages. When Hanna finally grows restless, Erik allows her to activate a beacon revealing their location to the CIA. Agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) immediately picks up the signal and sets in motion a plan to capture both Erik and Hanna.

Marissa and Erik shared a history within a secretive human DNA-altering CIA program before he broke away to care for Hanna. Now he is plotting revenge, and eludes his captors as he makes his way across Europe to a rendezvous point. Hanna allows herself to fall into Marissa's clutches, before embarking on a wild run from Morocco to Europe that sucks in an American tourist family. Meanwhile, Marissa turns to the unauthorized assassination team of Isaacs (Tom Hollander) to try and clean up the mess.

Directed by Joe Wright, Hanna deserves some recognition for attempting to introduce a new spin to the thriller genre. The opening 30 minutes, featuring Erik and Hanna living an off-the-grid arctic existence with the sole purpose of perfecting Hanna's endurance, survival, navigation and hunting skills, are a provocative proposition. Wright builds curiosity around the father-daughter pair, and a sturdy foundation is laid for the story to come.

Unfortunately, the rest of Hanna fails to live up to expectations. Once Hanna and Erik re-enter the civilized world, the film descends rapidly into most routine territory. The final hour is a succession of chase, fight and shoot scenes connected by the most rudimentary and underdeveloped plot points. Character development is forgotten in favour of the next set piece. While these are undeniably well-staged, Wright leaves his actors with precious little to work with, Saoirse Ronan stuck with a single expression of mild annoyance and Cate Blanchett channeling Cruella Deville. Eric Bana all but disappears from the film.

The one distraction from the mundane surroundings is offered by Hanna finding refuge with a clueless tourist family motoring through North Africa and Europe in an old-fashioned motorhome. Dad Sebastian (Jason Flemyng), mom Rachel (Olivia Williams), daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden) and son Miles have no idea who Hanna is but she tags along, sometimes invited but mostly not. Some depth potential is offered in the burgeoning bond between Hanna and Sophie, but like almost everything in the film, that promise is trampled in the rush to the next implausible fracas with the bad guys.

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Movie Review: Violet And Daisy (2011)

An action thriller with dramatic elements, Violet And Daisy borrows heavily from Tarantino in a story about two teenaged girl assassins on a mission that goes sideways.

In New York City, cool and carefree teenagers Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) work as a duo to assassinate targets selected by their handler Russ (Danny Trejo). After successfully completing a complex mission, Violet and Daisy reluctantly accept another quick and seemingly simple assignment because they need money to buy new dresses.

Their new target is known as just The Guy (James Gandolfini), and his crime is stealing money from gangsters. Violet and Daisy literally fall asleep on the job in The Guy's apartment, triggering a series of events in which they get to know the Guy much more than they intended, with Daisy in particular becoming sympathetic to his difficult relationship with his daughter. Meanwhile, the girls tangle with another hit squad, repeatedly run out of bullets, and learn some truths about each other.

Written, directed and co-produced by Geoffrey S. Fletcher, Violet And Daisy starts strong with direct echoes of Pulp Fiction and The Killers, but then stalls. The opening sequence features Violet and Daisy dressed as nuns, delivering pizza, engaged in banter and then blowing away an army of goons. The scene is magnificently Tarantinoesque, but also sets up expectations that Fletcher cannot deliver on.

Most of the rest of the film takes place in The Guy's non-descript apartment. The script falls short and does not sustain the drama-in-a-room premise. It's painfully clear that Fletcher runs out of ideas about halfway through, and fuzzy interventions by another assassin and a dream sequence start to meander towards incoherent territory.

Punchy interludes do liven up proceedings, including another shootout followed by an internal bleeding dance that corrals nasty and hilarious into the same loop.

If there is an underlying theme it appears to relate to father-daughter issues, with The Guy giving up hope as his daughter gives up on him and Violet dealing with absentee daddy and suppressed memory syndromes. But the film is too far into cartoonish violence combined with bubblegum irreverence to be taken seriously, no matter what the topic.

The three central performances are accomplished and deserved better material. Gandolfini delivers a controlled turn as a man close to the point of not caring, while Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan dive without hesitation into the make-believe world of giddy trigger-happy teenaged killers salivating about the latest fashion trend between hits. When assassins are motivated by designer dresses, the end must be near.

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Movie Review: Loving Vincent (2017)

An animated drama, Loving Vincent explores the artist's legacy through the mystery of his death. The film is a stylistic feast but struggles dramatically.

All the characters are represented by animated paintings of the actors. One year after the suicide death of Vincent van Gogh (voice and likeness of Robert Gulaczyk), family friend Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) is tasked by his father, postman Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), to deliver Vincent's final letter to his brother Theo. After learning that Theo is also dead, Armand travels to the village of  Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent lived his final years and created most of his artwork.

Armand investigates Vincent's final days and meets the people who knew the artist, many of whom appeared in his paintings. Innkeeper's daughter Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson) remembered Vincent as a troubled but kind man who had a turbulent relationship with his physician Dr Gachet (Jerome Flynn). A local paint supplies salesman, a boatkeeper (Aidan Turner), another physician, Gachet's daughter Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan) and the doctor's stern housekeeper all have different perspectives on the man, his life and death.

A Polish production co-directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, Loving Vincent is a partially crowd-funded labour of love. Approximately 125 classically trained painters created the 65,000 paintings used in the film. The scenes featuring Armand's search for the truth are all inspired by Van Gogh's actual paintings, animated in colour using his distinctive oil painting style. The flashbacks to Vincent's days in Auvers are in sharper black and white.

The film's dual aesthetic tonality carries echoes of the artist becoming famous only after his suicide. Van Gogh dedicated his art to capturing life's bursts of beauty, but was ridiculed and ignored while alive. He figuratively burst into life after he died, and the film stylistically echoes his tragic trajectory, a stark black and white when alive, erupting in rich colours after death.

Loving Vincent's visual achievement is certainly a thunderbolt of originality in the animation world. Sequentially, the imagery is first distracting, then fulfilling, and finally somewhat tiresome. The endless stream of animated images inspired by Van Gogh begins to feel like a gimmick. Meanwhile, the actors and their acting is lost within the post-impressionist style, and the film's emotions are stunted into whatever can be conveyed by the voiceovers. These feature a bewildering array of pronounced accents, mostly British and Irish, but certainly neither French nor Dutch.

The relatively limp story does not help. The letter is an obvious McGuffin, and Armand's search for the truth becomes a Sherlock-lite mystery where every witness offers a different version of events and the truth is somewhere between all the conflicting accounts. It's painfully clear that the details of Van Gogh's death are of limited significance long before the hard drinking and overly intense Armand labouriously reaches the same conclusion.

Undoubtedly imaginative, Loving Vincent deserves recognition for immense creativity, but it's also an experiment where an excess of art subdues substance.

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Movie Review: Lady Bird (2017)

A coming-of-age drama-comedy, Lady Bird is a poignant and irresistible exploration of the awkward transformation into adulthood, with two tremendous central performances.

Sacramento, 2002. Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is in her final year of high school and struggling to define herself while navigating a tumultuous relationship with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf), who is perpetually stressed about money. Christine insists that she be called Lady Bird, while at her Catholic school she carries the burden of coming from a poor family and has a limited number of friends, including Julie (Beanie Feldstein).

Determined to escape from Sacramento and seek a college education at a respectable east coast university, Christine has to face the reality that money is tight, her father Larry (Tracy Letts) is unemployed, and her grades are not quite good enough. She joins the drama club and finds her first boyfriend in Danny (Lucas Hedges). She also tries to fit in with a new set of friends, including rich girl Jenna (Odeya Rush) and cool band member Kyle (Timothée Chalamet), but growing up and striking out will not come easy.

Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, Lady Bird is a tender look at the mother-daughter relationship during the clumsy final steps on the journey from girl to woman. Gerwig infuses her film with plenty of humour while holding irony firmly in check, Lady Bird avoiding smart-alecky moments and just focusing on the small tears and joys that naturally flow through family life. The film is energetically edited by Nick Houy, some scenes lasting for just a few seconds, the pace conveying the blurry commotion of life's hectic high school chapter drawing to a close.

The film contains plenty of painfully real moments that dance between the playfulness and agony of a teenager exhibiting childlike behaviour in the service of budding adulthood. Christine is embarrassed by her family, her relative poverty and her city, and is beginning to find the tools of independence to help influence major life-altering decisions. At the same time, the final stages of high school carry less fear of disciplinary consequences, and Christine and her friends let loose. Previously hidden antics bubble to the surface, none more entertaining than Christine finding her voice during an anti-abortion lecture. She also participates in a prank involving the head nun as revenge for years of institutionalized paternalism.

But when Christine engineers the disappearance of a crucial math course grading book in a too-smart attempt to get into better colleges, the math teacher calls out her honour. The flash on Christine's face, brilliantly captured by Ronan, is the responsible adult starting to push aside the unaccountable child.

Away from the high jinx, Gerwig's story is about a mother who has sacrificed everything to make her family financially viable, and along the way forgot that expressed compassion and words of encouragement are more important than a tidy bedroom. The film's sustained emotional intelligence resides in Lady Bird being aware of  how much her mother loves her, despite the continuous barrage of incoming grief. Christine can sometimes handle the turmoil, but is also forced to invest plenty of time navigating around Marion's hardened emotions.

Gerwig needed two strong central performances to make the film work, and gets them from Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf. Ronan at 23 can still convincingly pull off 17, and plays Christine with the delicious slyness of a teenager beginning to believe she can outsmart the world of adults. Metcalf delivers a career defining role, conveying the harried life of a mother measuring life in dollars and cents, and yet somewhere deep in her heart still harbouring a deep if complicated love for her daughter.

Lady Bird glows with warm authenticity, the universal story of a fledgling adult seeking to fly away from a nest that will only start to look cozy from a distance.

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The Movies Of Saoirse Ronan

All movies starring Saoirse Ronan and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

Atonement (2007)

The Lovely Bones (2009)

The Way Back (2010)

Hanna (2011)

Violet And Daisy (2011)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Brooklyn (2015)

Loving Vincent (2017, voice, rotoscoped image)

Lady Bird (2017)

Mary Queen Of Scots (2018)

Little Women (2019)

Ammonite (2020)

The Outrun (2023)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Brooklyn (2015)

A coming of age cross-continental romance, Brooklyn is a small film with a large scope. The story of a young Irish immigrant woman creating a new life in the United States is filled with overtones of the future clashing with the past, the new world contrasting with the old, and how one individual story carves out a new nation.

It's the early 1950s in the Irish village of Enniscorthy. Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), a young woman with few economic prospects, has made the decision to immigrate to the US and settle in Brooklyn, with arrangements made by the kindly Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). Eilis leaves behind her mother (Jane Brennan) and sister Rose (Fiona Glascott), as well as her suffocating job at the local store run by the intolerable Miss Kelly (Bríd Brennan).

Eilis has to endure a bout of sea sickness in the trip across the Atlantic, and even after she settles into a rooming house run by Madge Kehoe (Julie Walters) and a job as a department store salesperson, she still suffers through a period of severe home sickness. Father Flood enrolls Eilis in bookkeeping night classes, and her prospects take another turn for the better when she meets handsome plumber Tony Fiorello (Emory Cohen), and they gradually start a romance. Eilis starts to feel settled into her new life, but Ireland comes calling again, and she will find herself torn between her country of origin and her chosen a new life.

An Irish - British - Canadian co-production directed by John Cowley and based on Colm Tóibín's novel, Brooklyn is a deceptively simple film. Through the story of one woman taking the courageous step to alter the trajectory of her life, Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby explore the universal dilemma of immigrants though the ages, the promise of economic opportunity competing with nostalgia in an eternal struggle to define home. The film is smart, funny and poignant, combining romance with heartache and societal tensions as Eilis grows from girl to woman and has to define her future.

Brooklyn unfolds in the welcome absence of any histrionics. Crowley maintains a steady emotional tone of self-reflection and exploration well within the range of normal life. Whether Eilis is achingly home sick or giddily falling in love, her behaviour is always within the familiar reach of a typical young woman tackling the challenge of growing up in a new world. The humour is subdued, and emerges mostly around Madge Kehoe's dinner table where Eilis engages with her cohorts, other Irish young women with distinctive personalities but similar challenges.

During their courtship Tony labels Eilis as "amenable" (she helps him find the right word), and she is presented as a quiet, thoughtful and self-aware woman who is nevertheless open to what life has to offer. In the film's final third Eilis journeys back to Enniscorthy, and keeps a secret that is essential to the story's structure of weighing the familiar against the contemporary. While somewhat in keeping with Eilis' character, her behaviour back in Ireland does stretch the bounds of expectation, although it serves the metaphorical objective of highlighting nostalgia's enormous power.

Brooklyn looks magnificent, the title borough recreated as a bustling 1950s immigrant haven, and small town Ireland hiding both charm and the social perils bought upon by insularity.

Saoirse Ronan, all of 21 years old, owns the film as Eilis, and creates a contemplative and still evolving main character. Ronan allows Eilis to grapple with tugs of the heart and the vulnerabilities of a young mind torn in different directions, and often acts most effectively with silent pauses and lingering looks, revealing Eilis' pragmatism to never be far from the surface.

Inspired by the powers that shape journeys across oceans, Brooklyn is a rare film that remains intimate, wistful and personal, while carrying the echoes of a universal story about falling in love with people and places new and old.

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