A beautiful tale of an Irish woman in mid-century NY

Arguments can be made as to how it achieves its effects, but what really matters is that “Brooklyn” locates and rides a river of intense emotion. There’s suffocating homesickness and breathless aspiration, not to mention the awful pressure of being young and having to choose your life path when you really have no basis for choosing, other than instinct. From the beginning, the movie establishes Eilis’ probity, innate dignity and courage, and we’re happy just to watch her try to make her way in life. When we first meet her, she is living in a little village in Ireland, with her no-nonsense older sister (Fiona Glascott, lovely in a small role) and her mother. Because Eilis can’t find work in town, her sister writes to an Irish priest in New York, who finds Eilis a sales clerk job in a high-end department store. The Brooklyn that Eilis travels to in 1951 is still the Brooklyn of early 20th century legend, a place reached by ship, with immigrants from everywhere, clay and brownstone buildings and a National League baseball team that plays at Ebbets Field. Aboard the ship, sailing to her new life, she tells someone where she is heading, and you realize, with a sense of awe, how the aspirations of people from all over the world once fixed on Brooklyn, of all places. [...] when she and a new boyfriend go to Coney Island on a date, we remember the exalted importance that that beach and that amusement park held for working-class people of several generations. Julie Walters has a featured but quite funny role as the Irish woman running a boarding house for women in Brooklyn, and Domhnall Gleeson has a slow-burning charm as a suitor back in Ireland.