In America, Irish-born director Jim Sheridan's somewhat biopic film about a young Irish family that illegally immigrates to the US in the early 1980s, hits exactly the wrong notes; it's comical when it should be serious, heavy when lighter moments would be appropriate, and disjointed where it should flow.
Johnny (Paddy Considine) moves with his wife Sarah (the pitch-perfect Samantha Morton) and two young daughters Christy and Ariel (real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger, respectively) to Manhattan, where he fails as an actor seeking work. Along the way, the family meets Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), a troubled artist dying of AIDS. The story is complicated by a back-plot detailing the death of the youngest child in the Irish family, Frankie, and Johnny's inability to accept the child's death.
Sheridan, it seems, cannot stop writing about the plights of Irish families. Nor should he. My Left Foot, a moving biopic of Irish artist/writer Christy Brown (who was paralyzed in every inch of his body except his left foot) was one of the best films of the last thirty years. In The Name Of The Father was another film about a troubled Irish family, this time about a father and son unrightfully imprisoned after they are falsely accused of a bombing in London. It, too, was equally spectacular. So what went wrong in America?
Fine acting isn't the problem. Considine is very versatile as Johnny, wearing his lumbering walk and teeming range like an old, method-acting cloak. Morton is probably the best one in the film; smart, honest, heartbreakingly tragic, she is the real back-bone of this tiny, quickly failing family unit. The Bolger sisters probably weren't even acting, it's obvious that they are truly close behind the camera. And Hounsou (Amistad) turns in the best performance of his career.
The problem is that all these fine actors didn't have a good script to latch on to. The film is written by Sheridan and his two daughters. While this gives the family scenes a lovable, almost playful rapport, the young women have clearly never written a script before. The pacing is off, the scenes either too long or too short. The static editing does nothing to help, and it looks as if the movie was cut together by an erratic, music-video director.
The back-story concerning Frankie – though it proves to create a touching ending scene – is complicating and unnecessary. The story takes more away from the principal actors than it gives them, and it should have been cut outright.
There is no master of the Irish plight like Sheridan. Throughout his many years of filmmaking, he has shown an ability to capture the pain and beauty of these people in beautiful, poignant pictures. Why the director's own life made for a bad movie, no one can say. Some parts of the movie (again, the final scene) are really terrific, but most of it is too much like real-life; boring and long-winded.
John Visclosky. John Visclosky is, suffice it to say, "hardly the sharpest intellectual tool in the shed," which is why he has stupidly chosen to here address himself in the third person. He's a mellow sort of guy who enjoys movies and sharing his feelings and innermost … More »
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