It is rather easy to resist giving overwhelming praise to a film that, from its poster-a silhouetted family of four, standing alongside their beat-up station wagon, peering across the Hudson at the picturesque fireworks exploding over a dimmed New York City skyline-seems to bask in the ‘land of opportunity’ known as America. But the poster seems to say nothing of the film.
The story follows Johnny (Paddy Considine, Twenty-Four Hour Party People) and Sarah (Samantha Morton, nominated for an Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown), a married couple who emigrate to America with their two young daughters, Ariel (Emma Bolger), the inquisitive six-year-old, and Christy (Emma Bolger), the sagacious and poetic narrator of the film.
The family moves into a slummy Hell’s Kitchen apartment building, riddled by technical problems and teeming with drug-addicts, and meets Mateo (Djimon Hounsou, Gladiator), a reclusive and mysterious tenant known, initially, as “the screaming man.” Mateo slowly permeates the lives of the family members, becoming an honorary member of sorts. As his story unfolds, so do the lives and the emotions of the family members.
Although the film’s central plotline follows the Irish family in their short and somewhat ancillary journey to America, following the family’s introduction to their new home, America itself bleeds into the margins. Thankfully the film’s director, Jim Sheridan, manages to resist crass American stereotypes of commercialism and social antipathy and uses the country as a sounding board to the central concern of the film-a family, that just happens to be Irish and that happens to move to America, trying to live and cope as a family. Even when the film seems to cater to preconceived clichés of Americana, these moments transpose themselves onto the problems of the small family, rather than expounding tired critiques of the empire.
Thematically, Sheridan walks a delicate balance between the polarities of life: happiness and grief, birth and death, memory and acceptance, magic and realism, intergenerational disparity; and mimics them with the polarities of both the social and the literal climate of New York.
The story is well-constructed and, although somewhat sentimental, resistant to sentimentality of the Jerry Bruckheimer sort. Unfortunately, though, the film loses its realism in moments, such as when the ten-year-old narrator’s verbosity and articulateness place her akin to Irish poet Seamus Heaney, rather than a youth.
Regardless, the film itself is well done, with relatively strong characterization and acting. The beauty of In America is its ability to deal with a family in America, and separate and complicate its concerns from without.
