A reason to give thanks

Even Sarah's short haircut serves a purpose, as if the spiky strands were antennae signaling her thoughts and feelings. Morton has not made the mistake that some actresses do, desexualizing herself because she's playing a mother. In one scene she sends the girls out for ice cream to the restaurant where she's picked up a waitressing job, so she and Johnny can make love. There's as much desperation as eroticism in their lovemaking, and while there's an element of craziness in Sarah's allowing herself to become pregnant (the doctor has told her that either she or her child might not survive another pregnancy), Morton makes it seem like a grab at life. She's not trying to replace Frankie as much as to negate the pain of losing him. She seems to believe that carrying a life inside her will somehow defy the fates. Morton erases the difference between Sarah's common sense and her faith in chance; she makes them the same thing.

"In America" moves with the sweetness and clarity of a child's song, literally in the scene where 10-year-old Christy, in a cowgirl outfit, gets up at a school parents' night to sing "Desperado." The Sheridans may have been inspired by the rendition of the song on the CD "The Langley Schools Music Project: Innocence & Despair," a collection of pop songs from the '60s and early '70s sung by schoolkids from a rural Canadian town.

Sarah Bolger's rendition recalls what Hans Fenger, the teacher responsible for putting that music together, wrote of 9-year-old Sheila Behman's version of "Desperado" on that record: "She sang it without a trace of sentimentality, a literal reading. She had no idea about the romantic cowboy stuff; she just heard it as sad, the way a child does." That's exactly how Christy and Ariel react to the life around them, directly, perhaps not understanding all the nuances of what's going on between their parents but with an instinctive grasp of the emotional climate.

We see the movie through the eyes of the two little girls. Christy, who manages her emotions by viewing the family through her camcorder, is the narrator. Ariel is a happier presence because her age protects her from some of Christy's knowledge. They are the audience's pipeline into the movie's emotions, and both of the Bolger sisters are lyrical perfection. Though they both give distinct performances -- Ariel's sunny openness to whomever she comes in contact with, versus Christy's warier and more fretful nature -- the pair take on the inseparable fluidity of a chorus.

The Bolger sisters make their way past your defenses, not with the practiced mugging of professional children but with the sureness of actors. Christy and Ariel also make their way past Mateo's literal and figurative defenses. Ariel knocks on his door during their first desultory experience with trick-or-treating. He invites the girls in, and soon Mateo has become a part of the family's life. Djimon Hounsou has been a beautiful camera subject in "Amistad" and "Gladiator," but he's never gotten the chance to prove himself as an actor the way he does here.

Mateo could easily be a disastrous conception -- a dying artist raging with his love for life and the knowledge that he has only so much time left. Hounsou simultaneously humanizes the conception and delivers a performance that scales operatic heights. You find yourself almost physically drawn to him, inclining in your seat to hear what he says or to watch the casual, regal way he carries himself. Moments that would defeat some actors (such as Mateo's outburst to Johnny about the love he feels for this Irish family) or that might feel impossibly coy (a quiet scene where he tells Ariel that, like her beloved E.T., he's an alien who is preparing to go home) come off instead as marvels.

But then, "In America" is a movie of marvels, one whose emotional pitch is never less than mysteriously right. The cinematography by Declan Quinn is very much an immigrant's view of New York, colored by romance and yet discerning. Even the grubbiest, most down-at-heels corners of the city feel alive, full of promise, the avenues and decayed buildings and neon possessing something of the quality of an enchanted forest, the kind where the very trees come alive to talk to you. That combination of enchantment and grit is the key to the movie, in which no victory comes without cost and where each emotional epiphany is surrounded by a nimbus of loss.

If a movie can be both robust and exquisite, "In America" is. In its final moments, Sheridan achieves something that only a few other directors have, easing you gently back into the world outside the theater. The movie itself is gift enough. For Sheridan and his collaborators to finish by telling you that the life waiting for you back in the world is another gift feels almost unbelievably generous. "In America" is the work of a great filmmaker who makes you feel as if you're in the presence of an Irish King Kong. Sheridan scoops you up in a rough-and-tumble embrace and then sets you down, safe and sound, back in your world. Not many great adventures have such a loving finish.

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