(rated R)
This little-gem-of-a-movie-out-of-nowhere opens with a hopeful family of Irish immigrants cruising through the Lincoln Tunnel full of bright lights, before landing in their new ‘haunted house” – a crack house they’ll call home, someplace in the Bronx. Penniless but not desperate, through two little girl’s eyes nothing is as bad as it seems. Their biggest concern is “can we keep the pigeons?” that fly through the broken glass windows of their dilapidated apartment. Jim Sheridan who brought us movies like “In The Name Of The Father” and “My Left Foot” now tackles a more uplifting and sensitive story (that he wrote with real life daughters Naomi and Kirsten) of a young Irish immigrant family with tones of his own personal past. Paddy Considine plays the haunted and determined father with a dream of becoming an actor and coming to terms with a tragedy best left in Ireland. Samantha Morton plays his supportive, American-dream chasing wife, while their daughters are played by real life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger, who could just be America’s hottest and most adorable Hollywood actresses, delivering a natural performances that usual child actors can’t. Their tenement house is also shared with a tormented yet commanding artist (Dijimon Hounsou) who eventually proves not to be as fearsome as we once believed, when he befriends the small girls and their love for life. The movie works because it’s layered with so many elements. We love these characters – their drive where most of us would fail, their feeling of appreciation and their lack of laziness in a world that we as Americans take for granted. And yet all pulled off without sentimental Hollywood mush.
