A reason to give thanks

Jim Sheridan's miraculous "In America," a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 26, 2003 | The three miracles that occur over the course of Jim Sheridan's "In America" pale next to the miracle of the movie itself. The story, about an Irish couple recovering from the loss of a child who move with their two small daughters from Dublin to a New York tenement, is the kind that invites all sorts of sentimentality about family and starting over and even redemption. "In America" is about all those things. But Sheridan is one of those artists unafraid of emotion. They are often the least susceptible to sentimentality, perhaps because they convey what they feel so strongly and so directly that, even at its largest and most unwieldy, the emotion feels pure. In the face of the fierce emotion that bowls through Sheridan's movies, sentimentality doesn't stand a chance.

Sheridan's best previous movies, "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father," explored subjects that could have tempted a less talented filmmaker into schmaltz and self-righteousness. Each work had scenes -- Christy Brown's anguished public declaration of love for his doctor (Fiona Shaw) in "My Left Foot"; Emma Thompson's outburst in the courtroom finale of "In the Name of the Father" and Daniel Day-Lewis' stride out the courtroom doors to freedom -- as overwhelming as anything else in the movies.

Some moments in "In America" affected me so strongly I didn't see how anything that followed could match them. But when Jim Sheridan is working at the top of his game, as he is here, it's like seeing Baryshnikov at his peak and not being able to believe his next leap would be higher than the one that already had your jaw dropping open. Sheridan doesn't exhaust your capacity to feel; he widens and deepens it until you're in communion with the people on the screen.

Sheridan wrote "In America" with his two daughters, Naomi and Kirsten. It's their own story they're telling. In the early '80s, after the death of Sheridan's brother Frankie (to whose memory the movie is dedicated), he, his wife and their two daughters moved to New York, flat broke, and settled in a Hell's Kitchen tenement while he tried to find work in theater. In the movie, Frankie is the name of the child that Johnny (Paddy Considine) and Sarah (Samantha Morton) have lost.

The top-floor walk-up they find for themselves and their daughters, 10-year-old Christy and 7-year-old Ariel (played by real-life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger), has, thanks to a smashed skylight, become a roost for pigeons (little Ariel asks her da if they can keep them). The rest of the building, thanks to the decay of New York in the '80s, has become a roost for junkies. They're always hanging around the lobby or the stoop. But even they seem afraid of Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), the artist who lives behind a door painted with the words "Keep Away" and whose presence is felt through the gut-wrenching howls of fury that emerge from within his apartment.

Johnny and Sarah and their girls don't need Mateo's outbursts to feel as if a spirit is haunting them. The dead Frankie is the family's phantom limb. For 10-year-old Christy he's a protective spirit, and she believes he's left her three wishes to be granted when she's most in need. Frankie is so alive for Johnny that when the family is crossing the Canadian border into the United States, he tells the customs officer they have three children. You feel the dead boy's presence in all the interactions between Johnny and Sarah. They're still obviously in love with each other, and they share a crazy faith in the family's ability to survive.

They turn their large, open apartment into something like a bohemian fantasist's idea of a big-city dwelling, using paint to spruce up the decrepit interior and adding trompe-l'oeil touches like painted vines climbing the walls. The place is their sanctuary, their playground, their fantasy fort. The tension in the marriage is in the way they tiptoe around the devastation of Frankie's death.

Johnny has switched on his internal autopilot of emotional self-preservation. It's not that he's abandoned his duties to his family. In one scene he drags a battered air conditioner across the city to give his family some relief from the New York summer, and you can measure his commitment to his three girls with every punishing step he takes lugging the thing up the precarious staircases of his tenement. Sheridan has given Paddy Considine the hard task of playing a decent, loving man who nonetheless holds himself in reserve, and Considine stays true to that conception without making Johnny cold. Part of his remove is just the armor he needs to get through the day, but we're always aware of the part beneath the surface, the loss that he tries to hold at bay for fear that it may undo him.

As Sarah, Samantha Morton turns in the latest of what has become a career of astonishments. After "Under the Skin," "Dreaming of Joseph Lees," "Sweet and Lowdown" and "Morvern Callar," I don't think it's too much to say that she's one of the greatest actors ever to work in the movies. Some actors are so alert and alive in front of the camera that you swear you can see them thinking. With Morton you feel as though you can see the blood coursing through her veins, even when she's doing something as simple as lying in bed.

Next Page: Don't miss 10-year-old Christy's pseudo-cowgirl rendition of "Desperado"

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