#25 — In America (Jim Sheridan, 2002)
It’s tempting when designating a film as great to expound on all the big, significant things that it does, to point out its mastery of delicate topics or celebrate the way it gets at experiences in a way that seems universal. Sometimes, though, it’s really about the small things, the simple things. Jim Sheridan’s In America can be held up as an example of a film that gets as the challenges of being an immigrant family. Even more broadly, it effectively captures the way any family or community struggles, the way that hardships mount and mount, testing courage and conviction, straining the very bonds that are most necessary, most sustaining. The film says something about the way people can come together movingly on the basis of their shared separation from the culture at large, their shared otherness. It is about art and loss and fear of illness. For all these broad, sweeping subjects, I think the element that makes In America really work, the element that makes it special is just this: I believe in the family at its core. I believe they know each other, love each other, rely upon each other. I believe in their battles, their sorrow, their elation. I believe that when they look at each other, they are seeing the entirety of their world in the face of someone they need in ways they can’t even begin to identify, it is so vast and so ingrained. These aren’t actors playing roles, this is a family living onscreen.

There’s a little truth to that with two of the family members. Sisters Sarah Bolger and Emma Bolger, eleven-years-old and six-years-old, respectively, at the time of the film’s release, play the daughters in the Irish nuclear family that has come to reside in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, in large part so the patriarch of the family can pursue an acting career. He’s played by Paddy Considine, bringing a stubborn stridency to the role, a brand of fortitude built on a prideful unwillingness to admit defeat, or even acknowledge setbacks. His character operates with an aversion to vulnerability, largely because of certainty that the first crack he allows in his shell of resiliency with split wide open and allow the heartbreak of a recent family tragedy consume him entirely. The fourth and final family member is the the mother, played with saddened dignity by Samantha Morton. She is simultaneously the mightiest and most fragile member of this modest clan, facing the worn down existence of her family with a tremulous sense that what little they’ve built can tumble apart at any time.

The film is alternately downbeat and celebratory, assiduously honest about the difficulties built right into modern life, particularly for those starting from a point where Square One seems a dreamlike goal, but also hopeful about the strength people can find in one another, be they the family you’re born into or the family that you find, build, nurture. It has an endearing earthiness, a dedication to its setting, right down to the ruggedness of the apartments and the seediness of the city. Sheridan artfully shows the ways in which these pieces of a life, these markings of lower income, become their own millstone. Homemade Halloween costumes are charming and warm, but can also sadly serve as a reminder of the things that are out of reach and the emptiness of the cupboard.

There is autobiography interwoven with the fiction here, and Sheridan recruited the assistance of his own two daughter in crafting the screenplay, an apparent effort to keep the memoir genuine and unsentimental. He may know the feeling of testing himself against a carnival game, gambling a thickening stack of the household savings against his own ability to simply throw a ball into a basket, but the more important perspective belongs to those who watch him do it, fervently protecting his ego despite the potential harm its causing to the family. By adding this balance, Sheridan strips away any temptation to romanticize or otherwise overly celebrate the aches and endurance of the family. To the degree that the story is that of his own family, it belongs to him, but he’s taken pains to be certain it belongs to them as well. It’s arguably the character of the father who is the clearest protagonist of the film, who goes through the dramatic changes we associate with a leading character. But, importantly, the film is narrated by the eldest daughter. It is her words, her explanations, and, at times, her earnestly voiced belief in the power she holds to rescue her loved ones from the direst of fates through sheer force of her wishes. She closes her eyes and chooses the outcome she wants, the outcome her family needs to survive that one more day, and in doing so, she makes it happen.

It’s a measure of the film’s offhand magic that, by the end, I start to believe in her powers, too. Plain and simple, it’s the happiest way to think of the onscreen family’s dented luck, their tender resiliency and their unyielding belief in one another.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)