Ray Pride

Would it be too much to say that Jim Sheridan's "In America" is the work of an Irish Fellini, a transcendent work of kitchen-sink magical realism?

After seeing it three times over the course of the year, I could make that argument for this sturdy, wistful, timeless fable. While there are sophisticated dramatic dichotomies and thematic strands, they flow quietly beneath an uncluttered surface. This is not a perfect movie, but the third go convinced me it's a great one.

An Irish family slips into circa-1982 New York from over the Canadian border, their heaviest baggage the death of a son a few years earlier. They move into a building full of drug addicts and immigrants from warmer climates. The father auditions for roles between driving a cab. The children integrate themselves into the teeming city, the even-more-teeming building. The father and mother are played by two of the most gifted actors working--Paddy Considine, Samantha Morton--but they are outshone by a pair of sisters named Bulger, two marvelous, exquisite little human beings. Sheridan is the sort of director willing to watch in wonderment at the marvel of curiosity and hope that is a child's face. There is one unforgettably played scene where the two watch their parents, proud, learning the knowing play of tease between their mother and father. (Their downstairs neighbor, an angry artist played by Djimon Hounsou, helps to open the family's constricted emotional world.)

Sheridan accomplishes some of what Wim Wenders once did so well with little girls magically protected on urban adventures like "Alice in the Cities." He draws from his own life, when he moved into New York's Hell's Kitchen, and the script is co-written by two of his daughters. Sheridan's made marvelous movies from books like "My Left Foot," but he also understands the timeless magic of personal mythology, and is one of the few filmmakers to so simply dramatize the intimate singularities of any family, its whispered, handed-down mythology, meaningless to those outside that tribe, behind that tight, modest, life-giving circle. This movie is unsentimental yet tender enough to make sweet creamery butter of a grown man. I tear up at the memory of a child who quietly complains, "I have no one to play with... I have no one to tell my secrets to."

Hounsou has a speech about secrets, too, one that some would call "on-the-nose," where the movie's themes are elucidated quickly and simply, but the words and the performance are etched as if with the lightning that fills the film: "I'm in love with your wife... I'm in love with your beautiful daughters... I'm in love with you! I'm even in love with your anger! I'm in love with anything that lives!"

Sheridan moved to New York in 1983. "There was a plague, like everyone was dying of AIDS," he says in his sly Dublin lilt. But the time, and the disease, are blurred in the movie. "It's easy to do gritty, socially aware pictures that nobody goes to see. It's actually very easy to do! I tried to keep it buoyant," he says, adding a self-deprecating and unnecessary, "I might not have done it."

Declan Quinn's cinematography is calm with furious bursts of quiet invention. "Declan allowed me to be a madman," Sheridan says, "trying to film all my aberrations." Trained in the theater, Sheridan says to him film is the actors and more of the actors: "When people say I'm in too close, I want to go closer." He also wants to keep everyone on the set confused. "You're in school when you're trying to direct. I say, 'Tell me about the scene.' Ten, fifteen minutes, everyone sits around and talks about it, than I say, 'Let's just shoot this and figure it out."

But Sheridan's also the kind of theater-trained talker who can toss off a sentence like this about the movie's bright and stormy nights: "Y'know, in Shakespeare, the storm always presages a spiritual change or an internal transformation." Or, straightforward apothegms about his job contained in an anecdote about trying to satisfy a child actor's curiosity. "Directing is easy, it's answering simple questions that's difficult." He continues, "It's a real mind warp when you work with children. People say, 'Don't work with children, don't work with animals.' It's a sick sentence. It just does my head in."

So does autobiographical reflection; the death of the son in the film is based on his brother's passing, so in effect, Considine is playing both Sheridan and Sheridan's father. "It's a weird thing, making a movie about your life--you're both making it, and it's making you. People don't realize the story is telling them. You know, they're not telling it."

The movie's ending breaks every rule in the book, particularly in terms of the suspension of disbelief, and it is magical, transporting, and effective beyond any expectation. "The end is to say, make your own pictures," Sheridan says. Why break those rules? "I dunno. 'Cos I'm perverted?" (He pronounces the word par-varrrted.") I thought I'd challenge everybody. The suspension of disbelief is hard to get off the ground, like a plane." But at the end of a movie, Sheridan says, if he can't challenge the audience, "If they're distanced already, I say to hell with them at that point." A character turns to the camera. The face is beautiful. The expression is beautiful. The image slows. The heart breaks. "It's like at the end of Beckett's 'Endgame,' right? What does Hamm say? 'Get over here and love one another.'"

"In America" is now playing.

(2003-11-26)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Art outside the gallery and work outside of boundaries: a program of short documentaries about disobedience with symbols in a symbolism-laden time
(2003-11-19)

The lie of the mind
Okay, so a movie's first scene has little Penelope Cruz squinting her little eyes and squeezing her small Spanish accent, telling her shrink, "He opened me like a flower of pain and it felt gooooooooood...
(2003-11-19)

Childish things
Nicolas Philibert's "To Be and To Have" is a magnificent construction of empathy, a quietly heartfelt portrait of a dozen or so pupils in a single-room school in an isolated French farming village
(2003-11-19)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-11-19)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-13)

Fearless
(2003-11-13)

Potter's field
(2003-11-13)

Short Runs
(2003-11-13)

Blackbird flies next door
(2003-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2003-11-05)

The revolution will not be realized
(2003-11-05)

I miss the innocence
(2003-11-05)

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