cbsreview: IN AMERICA

Once every long while comes a movie that tugs our hearts and won't let go days and weeks after we have seen it. The strength of the grip, on the most sensitive part of ourselves yet, usually finds provenance from the intelligence of the script and the intensity of acting, the truth being that what the characters say and how they say it remain the greatest factors by which movies rise and fall in the index of our emotions. Not cinematography, not sound or scoring, not production design or editing, and definitely not special effects manipulating the frailties of our perceptions - the requisite illusions serving only to confirm technology's share in the marketplace of our shallowness.

In America happens to be one of those films capable of blowing our minds with quietude, with solitude, with constant silence and buoyant smiles, with dry stares and small utterances of pain - instead of slam-bang computer generated sounds and imageries. After all, great acting requires great screenwriting, and the full length of this movie explains to us quietly but firmly that there is power in the raw, strength in the small. In In America, credit the rawness to the script of director Jim Sheridan and his two grownup daughters, and the smallness (lit and fig) to the two young actresses, sisters in real life, Sarah and Emma Bolger, in whose eyes (Sarah's, as Christy, specifically) we see their lives and how they try to live it.

The movie starts with an attempt at chance, the Sullivan family - daddy Johnny (Paddy Considine), mommy Sarah (Samantha Morton), and daughters Christy (Sarah) and Ariel (Emma) - trying to cross the border in search of a future. Through narrator Christy - the 11 yr old daughter serving as our window to the movie's soul - we learn that this family is on the brink of financial and emotional collapse, and a successful border-cross deemed the only way out of misery.

From that first scene we are introduced to this family (poverty-stricken Irish) and the character of its members: Christy is a deep thinker, courageous but melancholic (perfect qualities as narrator); Ariel is loose-lipped ("my daddy doesn't have a job", he tells the border patrol, jeopardizing their border-cross venture); Paddy is a weakling, weakened by some hurt he is hiding, obvious from his tentative responses to the border patrol; and Sarah is strong-willed, the real foundation of the family, firm in her looks, definite in her replies. When the family is finally allowed to cross, Christy thanks Frankie for granting her 1st of 3 wishes, and so we learn of Frankie, too: the 3rd child of Paddy and Sarah who died at age 1. He is the reason for this family's suffering and consequent decision to migrate.

New York City is the family's migratory choice, traditionally considered the land of opportunity and provider of change, and while that makes In America a movie about a family's desperate search for opportunity and a painful search for change, it does not show the city as a fountain of the American Dream - which is actually nothing else but a corrupted dream for everything material. On the contrary, In America shows New York City as the place to find things more valuable than material.

The movie shows its sincerity and dispels any propagandist idea that a reluctant moviewatcher may initially anticipate. The movie does not ratify the notion that America is a provider of change. The truth is boldly told: change comes from within, from the self, and this view is provided by the movie's two greatest heroes: mommy Sarah and neighbor Mateo.

Jim Sheridan could have put up signs on the borders getting to NYC that read America Starts Here to show physically, traditionally, culturally, what America is, but instead he chose not to be parochial by dropping, at once, all hints that America is milk and honey. The Sullivans end up in a bad part of Manhattan, setting domain in a dilapidated building, sharing stairways and alleys on a daily basis with people of hopeless future and hopeless attitudes - significantly personified by one panhandler who casually calls Johnny in annoying fashion, 'Hey, Irish' (which makes me shudder in thought that in the Philippines the natives call Caucasians in coarse casualness, 'Hey, Joe').

In America is a movie about emotions: love, lack of love, hidden love, abundance of love, pain, hidden pain, abundance of pain - a profusion of shots combining dialogues and expressions, silent and method acting, that consummates character buildup as a graphic case of storytelling. And this is emphatically true in the scenes depicting the twin conflicts of the film: the conflict between Johnny and Sarah, the former showing pessimism in his auditions (he is an unemployed actor) and translating his desperation to desperate measures such as betting their entire livelihood in order to get an E.T. doll for Ariel; and Sarah pointing to her husband's lack of feeling as the reason for his failure in the auditions ("you can't even feel the baby kicking in my belly", she tells him).

The second conflict, a high point in the movie, is the one between Johnny and Mateo (Djimon Honsou). Mateo is a mysterious apartment dweller, one floor up the Sullivan's, a total recluse emphasized by the screaming words on his door, Keep Out! He is an artist but his angst is brought more by his illness than by artistic zeal. One Halloween, the two kids trick and treat at his unit and will not go away despite his fervent screams to do so. When he opens the doors, his heart melts at the sight of the little angels and asks them to go inside. Right there, unforfettable friendship is born before our eyes, a friendship that Johnny apparently despises, not out of race (Mateo is African), but because the recluse is able to reach to his children far better than himself.

One very memorable scene is the confrontation between Johnny and Mateo (awkward to some viewers), where both men are able to bring out the hidden angst of the other. And so we come to know of Johnny's guilty feelings for the death of Frankie, and Mateo's real feelings for the world. They become aware of their demons, and that is a good sign.

By the end of the movie, we find a juxtaposition of life and death, one the beginning, the other the end, both signifying transition, the change. The premature birth of Johnny and Sarah's baby, and a dying Mateo (afflicted, we suppose, of AIDS) - beautifully rendered in split screen, brings the family closer together, and the only scene more moving is the final one where Christy looks at Frankie's picture on the lcd panel of her camcorder (the very first time we see him) and she asks him, after all her three wishes were granted, that she will close that phase of him, that she needs to move on, that he needs to let go. A child's innocent but strong plea, a plea for change.