Brooklyn (PG-13)
20th Century Studios; BBC Film; IMDb; Mongrel Media; Rotten Tomatoes; Screen Ireland; Searchlight; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube
This is based on a book I haven't read. The movie came out in 2015, but I didn't see it until 2020. I watched it on St. Patrick's Day, just because it's about a young woman from Ireland. Actually, I only watched most of it on St. Patrick's Day; before I could finish it, the Guinness was making it hard to focus. So I finished it the next night. Anyway, it's a good movie, and I certainly liked it, though maybe not quite as much as I'd hoped I would. At least, it doesn't seem to me like the kind of thing I'll care much about in a long term sort of way. (If I could make myself rate movies based solely on how much I like them while I'm watching them, instead of thinking about the future, this is surely one of numerous movies I'd rate higher than, you know, the rating I actually give them. Because I can't help but overthink things.)
So, Saoirse Ronan plays this Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, who moves to Brooklyn to find work, in 1951. She lives in a boarding house with some other young women. (One of them is played by Emily Bett Rickards.) And um, Eilis misses her home in Ireland, and her sister and mother. But she meets an Italian-American man named Tony Fiorello, whom she starts dating. She also begins taking night classes in bookkeeping, hoping to someday become an accountant. Later, she returns to Ireland (for a reason I won't spoil). But doesn't tell anyone about Tony, and she meets this other guy named Jim Farrell, whom everyone seems to expect her to start a relationship with. She also gets a temporary job, which could potentially become more permanent, so... she has to make a choice about staying in her hometown or returning to Brooklyn. (I feel like the question of whether she'd choose Tony or Jim was meant to be seen as a bigger deal than it ever really seemed to me. It never seemed to me that it was ever really in question at all.)
I'm leaving out plenty of details, I'm sure, but that's really all I feel the need to say about the movie. Except maybe I would have liked it more if I'd watched it all in one night. But anyway, Ronan, as always, was excellent.