In America Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)December 29th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
IN AMERICA
Directed by Jim Sheridan
PG-13, 103 minutes
Jim Sheridan's semi-autobiographical riff on family is a series of triumphs - small triumphs over large adversities, large triumphs over small adversities, triumphs over ghosts and demons, triumphs of luck, triumphs of love.
The story draws heavily on the memories mined by Sheridan and his daughters and co-screenwriters, Naomi and Kirsten, of the family's move to New York in the early '80s, when they slipped across the border from Canada on a tourist visa, and settled into a drug-ridden tenement in Hell's Kitchen. As we see them in the movie, they're Johnny (Paddy Considine), the father, an actor; his wife Sarah (Samantha Morton); and their two daughters, 10-year-old Christy and 5-year-old Ariel, played by sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger.
There is a fifth family member, their young son Frankie, who makes the trip in the troubled hearts and consciences of the rest of the family. Frankie's mortal remains are buried back in Ireland (the real-life model was Sheridan's younger brother, who died as a boy.) But his presence looms large, in Sarah's haunted eyes, in Johnny's quick defensive grin, in Christy's internal monologue that we hear in a sparingly used narration. The parents blame each other, and blame themselves, for the fatal accident that took Frankie's life, and try not to let it tear them apart. The older daughter communicates with her lost brother, and has the promise from him of three wishes. Only Ariel, the baby, is unaffected, except as the missing Frankie affects her family.
Poverty is the ruling condition of this family of Irish immigrants as they struggle to find their way in the land of opportunity. Johnny goes to auditions but fails to land a role, in part because he is emotionally blocked by Frankie's death. He winds up driving a cab. Sarah gets a job in a coffee shop. Money is counted in coins. When Johnny risks the rent money at a street fair ball-toss game, it is more heart-stopping than any car chase or battle scene you'll see this year.
Because this movie is about family, and emotion, it travels a risky set of rapids that threatens constantly to wreck it on rocks of sentimentality. But Sheridan, who has braved these hazards before in movies like My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, knows how to steer, and only occasionally does he jar the story against the maudlin. He has an ear and an eye and a feel for truth, and he can move us from laughter to tears without making it seem calculated.
A lot of that truth comes out of inspired casting. The Bolger sisters are a wonderful discovery -- perfectly natural, cute without being cloying. As Ariel, Emma has the directness of observation and spontaneity of a little girl who has no clue that there is a camera within a mile of her. As Christy, Sarah has the responsibility of providing some narration and the overall point of view of the movie. She has (a bit anachronistically for the early '80s) a camcorder through which she views and records some of the family's doings. We watch her grow over the short course of the movie's time frame - about a year - and when, near the end, her father cajoles her as "little girl", she retorts "Don't 'little girl' me - I've been carrying this family on my back for the past year!" It's not entirely true, but she feels that it is, and that's what counts.
The physical heavy lifting is done by Considine, struggling up the stairs of the tenement walk-up with a massive air conditioner in his arms, or dancing a little jig to seduce his younger daughter out of a nightmare. In a character blessedly free at least of the Irish curse of drink, he has plenty of other demons to wrestle with, not least the dead zone he feels inside and tries to mask with a jester's cheer. And Samantha Morton, who has shown us in the past what she can do with silence in movies like Sweet and Lowdown and Minority Report, has more to say here as Sarah, but silence remains a potent weapon of expression for this powerful actress.
Rounding out the dynamics of this movie's relationships is Mateo, "the screaming man" who lives downstairs. Djimon Hounsou (Amistad), a remarkable actor who is one of the most imposing physical presences in film, plays an anguished artist dying of a disease that has not yet come to be commonly known as AIDS. The girls meet him when they pound on his door trick-or-treating. He emerges as an ogre and is softened into a gentle giant, a scene rife with possibilities for disaster, but it comes off. Later he and Johnny recognize the death in each other, and Mateo forms a bond with the family that borders on the mystical.
In America can be giddily funny, and wrenchingly sad. It is beautifuly photographed by the great cinematographer Declan Quinn. The story does err from time to time in the direction of cuteness and sentimentality, but never for long, and never fatally. Sheridan has a tremendous sense of composition, and when he puts together a scene like the one that intercuts between Johnny and Sarah's passionate lovemaking, Mateo's anguished painting (two acts of creation, as it turns out), and the two girls across the street eating ice cream sundaes as the mother of all thunderstorms rocks lower Manhattan, it is movie-making at its best.
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