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REVIEW: IN AMERICA
(Jim Sheridan, 2003)
Reviewed
by Matthew Plouffe
a Film Comment online exclusive
The films of Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan are often remembered as the films of Daniel Day-Lewis, the near-deified thespian whose performances often eclipse those of his collaborators, both onscreen and off. Unabashedly actor's vehicles - perhaps by default - three of Sheridan's four previous directorial efforts (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and The Boxer) utilize traditional storytelling to showcase Day-Lewis in well-financed master classes basking in the golden glow of 13 Oscar nominations between them. Like other theater directors transplanted to a canvas fold-out behind the camera, Sheridan effortlessly assumes a backseat to the actors, favoring word over image, emotion over cutting. Opting for honesty in shrewd conventionality, he's driven past the turnoff to auteurism, continued down the straight and narrow, and on past those cineastes more concerned with splices than Stanislavsky. But in his fifth and most magical movie, which foresakes Day-Lewis to detail a family's emigration to America through the eyes of two little girls, all that may just change.
Samantha Morton, Paddy Considine, and real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger comprise the family of Irish immigrants hoping to start anew in Manhattan after the tragic death of a third sibling, Frankie. Their experiences in New York-based in part on Sheridan's own tumultuous arrival - are filtered primarily through the perspicacious intellect and treasured DV cam of a pre-adolescent old soul; avoiding the thirteen-going-on-thirty cliché Hollywood usually indulges (see: Fanning, Dakota), Sarah Bolger offers a pitch-perfect performance as a child whose eyes have seen too much for one so young.
Setting down in a devastated Hell's Kitchen apartment, the foursome conceive a life short on cash, making the most of the city's simple pleasures. While Considine tries to find acting work, ostensibly nondramatic plotpoints extracted from the minutiae of metropolitan living are masterfully transformed into high drama. In a father-as-strongman vignette, Considine saves his family from the sweltering heat, dodging truculent cabbies with a rusty air conditioner before tackling a perennial NYC bête noire: the walkup. Likewise, Sheridan dramatizes for prime impact a carnival game gamble: a wife puts her faith and the rent money on the line for a father whose tottering ego won't allow a moment's remission in front of his proud daughters. War seems to be waged everywhere, from the dilapidated apartments, to city streets, to the ultraviolent changing seasons of the bitter outside world.
But between horrific summer humidity and winter's biting chill, the girls trick-or-treat their way into the apartment of a neighbor played by Djimon Hounsou. The family soon develops a relationship with this ailing artist-known to the sisters as "the man who screams" - and as Morton's pregnancy advances in a life-for-life hand-off, the stranger induces them to come to terms with the death of their beloved Frankie and the imponderable pain of grieving loss. From those glowing embers, the will to start over begins to emerge.
The subject matter isn't as opaque as in Sheridan's previous films and while searching out the subtleties of the arduous ascent from rock bottom back to "normality," he treads new cinematic terrain without holding back. In America is suffused with the magical haze of childhood perception, through which, influenced by parental misinformation intended to shield a child from harsh truths, disease and death, guilt and redemption, seem like acts of an oneiric deity. That haze is also manifest in the hands of a filmmaker in the process of transplanting himself from the frankness of filmed theater to the mysticism of cinema. Casting aside the amateur earnestness often found in My Left Foot (I always found Day-Lewis's crippled Christy Brown stopping a soccer ball with his face and biting the opposition's ankles more objectionable than triumphant), Sheridan expresses with precise nuance a family's bond, tested under the weight of a cross its members must bear together.
Though his ability to elicit the finest from actors is even more apparent sans super-thesp Day-Lewis, in the eyes of a pair of tyro-tots with heart to spare, it's Sheridan's own maturation that forms the core of the film. Ultimately, In America attests to the late blooming of an artist well into his fifties. Sheridan proves he's got a lot more to say, and that it will be born of new, cinematically-infused blood, pumping assiduously through this Irishman's veins. - MATTHEW PLOUFFE
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
