Day 23: "In America" (2002) - Perfect Rainy Day Movie

Film 21: “In America” (2002)

Written by Jim Sheridan, Naomi Sheridan & Kirsten Sheridan
Directed by Jim Sheridan

It’s raining today in San Diego – a fairly steady, gray rain – not a storm. The wind is cool. I can hear small splashes out my window at the stop sign everytime someone goes by. In short, it’s the perfect time to cuddle up with a great movie and some hot chocolate – and this is the movie for the job.

It’s a smaller story – one of a modern Irish family immigrating to Manhattan. Few stories, even fewer films, manage to show us a family honestly, from all points of view, without prejudice or maudlin background music. This one does. There’s plenty of praise to go around – a screenplay actually written by the family whose story is being told, writer/director Jim Sheridan’s steady, intimate direction, and a cast, though featuring some new faces, that must rank among the profession’s elite.

But as a writer, I’m drawn to story, and I was enthralled by this one. I suspect that’s because even when father Johnny (Paddy Considine) loses his ability to experience either real joy or pain, his daughters Christy and Ariel (Sarah and Emma Bolger) still play silly games with him, never losing faith that he’ll be better someday. And when Christy, perhaps all of 11 years old, gets frazzled and tells her father she’s exhausted from carrying the family around on her back, he listens. He doesn’t know what to do, but he does listen. He tries. Mom Sarah (Samantha Morton) loses faith in just about everything and everyone at various points on their journey, but she never walks away. Nobody here is taking the easy way out. They bruise each other, yes, but they buoy one another, too.

Their isolation in New York helps this along of course. They don’t have anywhere else to go, literally saving each penny that comes their way. But how many films have we seen that not just show, but glory in the small cruelties we inflict on our loved ones? How few there are that show how truly difficult it is to stick together, even when you really want to. This is one of those films – full of people I’d want to know, played by a cast at the top of the game, including the always brilliant Djimon Hounsou, who won several awards for his portrayal here of a short-tempered artist neighbor – and two of those players are younger than 12.

And as a little icing on the cake, little nuggets of cross-cultural wonder: Christy, experiencing her first stateside Halloween, explains to her parents (who can’t understand what she and Ariel plan to do in their required costumes) that Americans don’t ask for help, they demand it: “Trick or Treat!”

This is definitely the latter.