“Home is Home”
Written by Khatia Mikadze
“Homesickness is like any sickness, it will pass.”
Or so says a pastor to a young immigrant woman from Ireland in Brooklyn, a newly released romantic drama based on Colm Tóibín’s novel that’s directed by John Crowley. It tells the story of a young girl who immigrates from a small Irish town to New York City in the 1950s and settles in Brooklyn, a hub for Irish immigrants at the time. The main character, Eilis Lacey, is played by Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, lending the story a perfect touch of authenticity.
The film, which hit theaters on November 4, 2015, gives an incredible insight into the dreams, emotions, inner struggles, and homesickness of a young immigrant woman. In contrast to other recent films touching on the same subjects (like The Immigrant), Brooklyn allows viewers to take a deeper look into the heart of a young woman who’s struggling to be in two different worlds simultaneously. Brooklyn unveils the hidden sickness that many people new to the US experience, particularly in New York.
We first meet Eilis in Ireland where she works at a local grocery shop. Unable to envision higher prospects in her small town, she decides to leave home and boards a ship to New York City. Her life completely changes when she arrives. She moves into a boarding house with other Irish women in Brooklyn and finds a job as a sales woman at the department store with the help of an Irish pastor (Jim Broadbent). As a young girl from a small and predominantly monoethnic Irish town, Eilis struggles to assimilate to American life at first and experiences culture shock, particularly when she encounters people of different races and religions. She suffers from severe homesickness and loneliness — she is too shy and depressed to even talk to customers at the store.
In a letter to her sister who stayed in Ireland, she writes about how difficult it is to be away from home. Soon after, at an Irish dance club, Eilis meets Tony (Emory Cohen), an Italian plumber from Brooklyn, who soon becomes her boyfriend. As Eilis starts feeling more comfortable in NYC, she enrolls in bookkeeping classes and makes plans for the life she had always hoped for.
But she is then notified of her sister’s tragic death and immediately decides to take a short visit to Ireland to support her grieving mother. In Ireland, she finds a different kind of life she has missed. There are familiar comforts — her house, her family and old friends. She also meets a local boy who has grown into the handsome Jim (Domhnall Gleeson), who falls in love with her and urges her to stay in Ireland.
This is where the film forces the viewer to step back for a moment and look at the bigger picture presented by the director: torn between two countries and two different futures; stay in Ireland or go back to Brooklyn. Both futures seem comfortable but not perfect. The life Eilis created in Brooklyn along with Tony seems too good to abandon but her home is much sweeter than anything or anyone across the ocean, in Brooklyn. Eventually, Eilis leaves Ireland and reunites with her now-husband Tony, but her decision reveals inner struggles of many immigrant women, then and now.
Like Eilis, young immigrant women who come of age in the US face the same limbo: they belong to two different worlds, but at the same time they do not belong fully to either one. They see more prospects in the US and they manage to eventually assimilate into American culture, get an education and become successful. But returning home even for a short visit or vacation often revives hidden feelings like regret or possibly even guilt. Thoughts like “What if I stayed?” or “Where would I be now?” make women wonder if it was worth it to leave home and be away from their loved ones.
There are two different comforts immigrants find: one at their birth home and the other in their host country. But because “home is home,” as Tony says in Brooklyn, homesickness passes, but it is also always there. It reminds us of our sweet little town and it reminds us of where we came from.
