Article by: Josh Bradley

Most of the nominees for Best Picture are fairly easy to sell. A lot of them have well-known directors and stars (Bridge of Spies, The Revenant, The Martian); they’re sequels to well-known movies or based on well-known news stories (Spotlight, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road); even the small indie drama is high-concept and tangentially related to recent memorable headlines like the Ariel Castro kidnappings (Room).

Brooklyn has no such hook. The best I can do to sell it: “So, it’s the 1950s, and, like, this Irish girl immigrates to America, and, like, she’s really sad and stuff because she misses home. But then she, like, meets a guy or whatever, but then can’t decide if she should stay in America or go back to Ireland, and…yeah.”

The lesson here is that a movie’s quality isn’t always dependent on its hook, because Brooklyn is considerably better than most of those others that seem more appealing at first glance. Yeah…I’m as surprised as you are.

In 1952, Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is living with her mother and sister in a small town in southeast Ireland. Her older sister, Rose, gets in touch with a priest in New York (Jim Broadbent) and arranges for Eilis to move to Brooklyn in search of more opportunity and a better future. Eilis leaves her mother and sister behind, boards a boat for America, begins working at a department store and living in a boarding house, and becomes cripplingly homesick. But, she begins to adjust, and she makes a promising life for herself in her new country, helped in no small part by a romance with an Italian-American guy named Tony (Emory Cohen).

Just as things are looking perfect for Eilis, unforeseen circumstances force her to return to Ireland temporarily. While she’s back visiting, she’s courted by an old acquaintance, Jim Farrell (Domhnall Gleeson), causing Eilis to question where her home and her life truly are.

Brooklyn is far better than it has any right to be. I said something kind of similar about Whiplash last year: that it’s a tough sell because the premise – a jazz drummer in music school with a dick teacher – doesn’t do justice to how good it is. But I think the difference is that Whiplash had a great story derived from its so-so premise, and whatever it lacked in premise it made up for in plot. But, not only does Brooklyn not have an exciting premise to pique your interest, it doesn’t really even have that impressive of a story when you actually watch it. And yet…it’s so so great.

The reason it’s so so great is because the characters are outstanding, and the interactions between the characters are outstanding. It’s kind of like the anti-Spotlight, which had sparse characters and a great story; here there’s sparse story but great characters. They could make a two-hour movie of just Eilis sitting around the dinner table with the other people in her boarding house, or walking the beach with Domhnall Gleeson’s character, and I would watch the shit out of both of those movies. Everything about Brooklyn is just so. Damn. Charming. I was over an hour into this movie when I realized that I’d be unconsciously smiling for the entire runtime. It’s just so easy to fall in love with the characters, you don’t even notice how invested you’re getting.

And again, looking back on the story now, I’m surprised at how invested I was. The most interesting part of any story is conflict, but…there’s not really an antagonist in this movie. Screenwriter Nick Hornby joked in an interview that it’s a movie about people being nice to each other. And in some sense, he’s right; all the conflict is internal, in Eilis deciding what kind of life she wants for herself. And…I honestly never thought I could ever care so much about a 21-year-old girl deciding what she wants.

Saoirse Ronan (“Shur-shuh” like “inertia”) is marvelous as Eilis. She’s the only person who has a prayer’s chance of beating Brie Larson for Best Actress, and her performance speaks for itself. Same for Emory Cohen. He’s absurdly charming, and anytime he and Ronan are on screen together, it’s beautiful. And the fact that the only other movie I’ve seen him in is The Place Beyond the Pines – where he plays the exact opposite of charming – makes his Brooklyn performance all the more impressive. But the one performance I want to single out is Domhnall Gleeson. Without saying too much, his character, Jim Farrell, is introduced at a time when both the audience and Eilis are poised to hate him. We want to hate, we try to hate him, we’re looking for any reason to hate him…and we never get it. Every line, every inflection, every glance, he’s under intense scrutiny and yet he disarms us (and Eilis). If that character or that performance is even slightly off, the third act doesn’t work and the whole movie doesn’t work. Luckily, it does and it does.

It’s possible that it may have rung more true with me personally – because, like Eilis, I too recently left my home to move to a new city thousands of miles away – but regardless of whether or not this is your personal story, it is a lot of people’s. America is a nation of immigrants, after all, so if you live in America, chances are, one of your ancestors at some point had an experience like Eilis’ – coming to a new country in search of a better life, because the life they were facing was stagnant (or worse). And Eilis’ move to America can be seen as a metaphor for any number of drastic life changes – doing something scary and overwhelming in order to give yourself more opportunity for a better life doesn’t always involve a physical move.

For Eilis, it’s less about the move and more about growing beyond the life she was born into and instead making her own life. Instead of timidly letting other people tell her what to do and how to live – which is definitely where she started (even her move to America was facilitated by outside forces) – by the end, she is definitive, confident, and powerful enough to control her own life. And while the decision is hers to make, she also must reconcile the fact that, whichever life she chooses, it’s only as good as the people in it.