Movie Review: Brooklyn

I rarely get the chance to write reviews just after seeing a movie, but Amazon has a couple Black Friday deals that are coming up, so I’m looking for reasons to stay online for a bit.  In all honesty, this is not the type of movie I would never see.  As the trailers rolled, I was reminded of this, as not one of those was catering to me in any substantive sort of way.  It might have been in my best interest to read some of the reviews just to get a better idea of what I was getting into.  Having said that, I still enjoyed the movie, to a degree.

The movie follows the story of a girl who has no prospects, financially or romantically, in her home of Ireland and moves to America, with the help of her sister.  At first she hates it in America, being homesick, until she meets with priest who enrolls her in night school.  As she gets acclimated to life in Brooklyn, she meets a boy and much to my surprise, he was an actual gentleman (something we seem to lack nowadays).  The unfortunate happens, as is often the case in these sorts of movies and her sister dies suddenly and when she goes back to Ireland, everything seems both foreign and unfamiliar.

Without spoiling the crux of the story, the viewer is taken on this adventure with the young protagonist as she tries to make sense of her life.  What I thought startling was how selfish I viewed her behaviour (in concert with my mother’s views).  Nothing the young girl does really benefits anyone but her and while that does seem to be the American way, her family helped her make a life abroad and one would think she’d show some accountability for that.  In that respect, I found her greatly unsympathetic, at times wondering when the movie would be over.  I did eat an entire bag of popcorns (large) and that was both impressive and troubling.