in america (2003)
			director:  jim sheridan samantha morton, paddy considine djimon hounsou, emma bolger sarah bolger unfashionable observations rating: B				In America is one of those movies that coddles you with its own inspired sense of warmth and friendliness.  It’s a movie about family love, and the emotional ties that bind us together—sometimes too tightly.  However, despite some amazing performances, this movie suffers on account of its rather hackneyed method of establishing familial reconciliation.  Indeed, its predictability is mind-bogglingly inane, so much so that one wishes that the last half hour had not been filmed at all. This film tells the story of Irish immigrant Johnny (Considine), his wife Sarah (Morton), and their two imaginative young daughters, who are all looking to start their lives anew in New York after suffering a family tragedy back home.  Clinging onto their precarious sense of hope, they move into a rundown apartment complex full of drug-dealers in the toughest part of Manhattan.  Buying into the fantastic notions of the American Dream, they are soon struck with the reality of hard to find jobs and sub-par living conditions.  However, the two girls find the city to be a nice escape from their past lives, and come to believe that there’s magic in Manhattan.  Acting as foils to their melancholic parents, we find that the girls have much to teach Johnny and Sarah about living, and about moving beyond tragedy.  This movie is great up until the appearance of the mysterious neighbor, played by Djimon Hounsou.  At that point, the movie takes a very spiritual, self-help-like quality that is hard to swallow without a good rolling of the eyes.  That the movie insists on a kind of metaphysical reconciliation between loved ones lost, and loved ones found, is not the problem.  The problem is that the movie insists on this overtly, without any restraint at all.  Mere suggestion is not enough for director Jim Sheridan; at one point, he finds it necessary to cut from one scene to another in rapid succession in order to make us fully aware of the tired, overdone metaphors with which he plays.  It kind of reminded me of the infamous scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, where the psychologist explicitly explains the entire movie to us in two minutes.  Indeed, Psycho would have been a flawless film had it not been for that one brief scene.  Unfortunately, In America isn’t nearly as resilient as Psycho, as its problem scenes take up the entirety of the final half hour of the film.  Absolutely nothing is left to the imagination. Furthermore, the family’s fixation with their personal tragedy of yesteryear makes for some very repetitive scenes, where we learn again and again just how that incident has haunted them, even after they have physically left their past lives behind in Ireland.  While it is obvious that such a fixation would naturally lead to devoting a lot of film time to the issue, it could have been presented more subtlety.  Instead of hammering it into the audience again and again, one or two central, dramatic scenes establishing that theme would have sufficed.  Indeed, such scenes are present, yet they are repeated all too often. While In America gives us some of the most heartwarming performances of year—especially from sisters Emma and Sarah Bolger—the film itself is not worthy of them.  Had the director avoided the obvious clichés that plague movies about family tragedy, this movie would have been one of the best of the year on account of its performances alone.  Unfortunately, not even the great performances can salvage this movie from the unabashed mediocrity of its final resolution. I’d give Jim Sheridan's In America a B.
	Unfashionable Observations by Xavier Morales © 2003