Some might be surprised by the candor of Jim Sheridan. The stout, soft-spoken Irish director, given to whimsy, magic and politics doesn’t immediately strike one as an outspoken man. But when Sheridan bellows, in response to English criticism of his new film, In America, “I’m not bleeding Anglo, so go stuff yourself!” certain incongruities seem to fade. This is a man of contradictions-not in the traditional sense-but insofar as he is willing to permeate and play with both ends of any spectrum-finding himself somewhere in the middle of it all.
In America seems a departure for the seasoned writer, producer and director (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father). “To me, it is sentimental”-not sappy, mind you-but largely biographical and indicative of his own past, it’s “about letting the dead go.” A process he worked through during his late teen years when his younger brother Frankie died at the age of ten. Frankie figures largely into In America; the son of the protagonist, Johnny (Paddy Considine), Frankie dies prior to the film’s action. Mentioned only in passing by the story’s characters, Frankie physically appears only in fragmented and phantasmagoric images; mere wisps of a hardly forgotten, but largely mythologized central figure and symbolic motif.
Almost wholly autobiographical, the central character of Johnny-an amalgam of himself, his father and the interpretation of Paddy Considine, who plays Johnny in the film-became the partially cathartic vehicle to Sheridan’s own grief. “I stop myself, I never let myself go…It’s [the death of Frankie] not out of my system,” Sheridan admits during a recent promotional stop in Toronto, transposing the sentiment onto his semi-autobiographical character.
“Johnny has to face the idea that you can’t protect your family from loss and uncertainty, certainly not by hiding. But you can love them, and love itself is a kind of protection.”
The film, which follows a small family of Irish émigrés to America, is not a foreign topic for Sheridan. “A lot of what takes place in the film really happened to us,” Sheridan recalls. “I really did drag an air conditioner across New York, I really did lose a lot of money trying to win an amusement park doll and we really did have a premature baby.”
Yet the film isn’t merely a faceplate to an autobiography (“To make myself [Johnny] likeable I had to steal certain things from my wife”), but rather, a realistic portrayal of a tumultuous time in the lives of newly landed illegal immigrants.
“If you’re illegal, you’re a desperado,” Sheridan half-jokingly admits. ” I definitely changed and added a lot of things [to the film…] In fact, in some cases, the truth was far too strange to work as fiction, and we wound up cutting out things that actually occurred because they seemed entirely too extraordinary.”
Throughout the film, however, the stories of the family do become something bizarre and amazing at the same time, a technique Sheridan calls “magical realism.” Balancing the magical (the young narrator’s three wishes and their seemingly fantastic actualization) and the realistic (the grim reality of a cash-strapped family working through a death), was a task Sheridan grappled with throughout the process of the film. “I needed the magic,” he admits, “To me, the film is ultimately about wonder. It’s about trying to see the world with a kind of child-like, magical quality.
“But as many Irish people before them did, they have left Ireland in desperation and come to a new land. But it isn’t an economic of political desperation that brings them to America-it’s an emotional desperation.”
But for Sheridan, the film is ultimately uplifting, and recounts the tough times of his past and the realism of the present. “This is a hopeful, loving story about New York,” and an experience that Sheridan hopes the audience will never forget.
