Brooklyn (Crowley, 2015)
I haven’t highlighted anything on TVNZ+ here for a while so yesterday I did a long scroll through all the feature films they currently have on the site.
When I came to Brooklyn, I realised that I could remember liking it but not whether I had reviewed it (or even the circumstances of seeing it).
Searching the RNZ website revealed the reason why.
Back in January 2016, I wasn’t yet the straight substitute for Simon Morris when he took leave from At the Movies. I would go in and have a freestyle conversation with Standing Room Only host Lynn Freeman rather than script and edit a show as I do now.
Brooklyn was, in fact, reviewed on 24 January 2016. It’s understandable that I don’t remember doing it because that was also the day that the editor-in-chief and I got married. In fact, it was probably going to air at roughly the same time that we were standing on the stage at BATS Theatre in Wellington exchanging vows — the segment was pre-recorded on the Friday, two days earlier.
Why was I bothering to review movies for the radio when I should have been preparing for the biggest day of my life?
Because I’m still terrified that if I ever say no to RNZ, some other bugger will get in there and I’ll never be asked back. (Which is a reasonable fear as that’s how I got the gig in the first place.) I’ve done segments from some unlikely places in order to never miss an appointment: hotel rooms in Åhus, Sweden, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Rotorua, New Zealand; my mother-in-law’s house in Sydney; on the side of State Highway 1 outside Tokoroa; and a particularly disastrous effort from the staff room at Bethlehem College in Tauranga which turned out to have very poor cell coverage.
Anyway, here’s some of the transcript of that conversation to confirm that I do, indeed, recommend John Crowley’s Brooklyn:
Brooklyn is genuinely a lovable film. It’s adorable. It’s very, very sweet-natured. Well, actually, no, there’s one antagonist in the film who is a not-very-nice person, but everybody else is kind of lovable, and you sort of hope that they’ll all get on together.
So this is about a young woman in rural Ireland who is given the opportunity to go to the United States of America, to New York City in the early 1950s, to escape the lack of opportunity, effectively, for her and her family. She’s sponsored by a Catholic priest in New York who gets a letter from her sister and says, well, we’ll find her a job, we’ll get her a visa, and we’ll give her a chance at a new life. She takes the boat over, finds a room in a boarding house that’s run by the brilliant Julie Walters, who steals every scene that she’s in. In fact, I think every scene she’s in is actually in the same room, so it probably didn’t take that long to shoot.
Also in that segment, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight — RNZ flew me up to Auckland for the local première which was attended by QT himself — and The Big Short.
Where to watch Brooklyn
Aotearoa: Streaming on TVNZ+ (free with ads) or Beamafilm1
Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow, ABC iView (free) or Beamafilm
Canada: Streaming on Paramount+
Ireland: Digital rental
India: Digital rental
USA: Streaming on Hulu
UK: Digital rental
