The family you see on the screen in In America is so incredibly genuine, it feels like you are watching your neighbors or a family that you met at the grocery store. This makes sense when you consider that writer/director Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) peppered the script with true-life events from his past and the fact that real-life sisters, Sarah and Emma Bolger, play sisters in the movie. If you're not yet familiar with their names, don't worry, you soon will be. These kids have acting chops in spades. The parents aren't bad either as portrayed by Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) and Paddy Considine (24 Hour Party People). Clearly they gelled as a unit, and as a family give a truly impressive performance. In fact the entire cast is great; including Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Gladiator) as the mystical Mateo.
In America tells the story of Johnny and Sarah (no last name is given) a young couple who emigrate from Ireland to the United States with their two daughters; older sister Christy and younger sister Ariel. Having very little money, they move into a rundown tenement in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen. A squalid neighborhood peopled with drug dealers and prostitutes. On the floor below them, with the words - Stay Away - painted in big yellow letters on his door, lives the man who screams.
As it turns out, although they are poor, this family has come to America as much to heal, as for economic reasons, having recently suffered the death of their youngest child. A four-year-old boy named Frankie. The struggle to stay above water financially, coupled with the daunting task of adjusting to their new environment, forces the family's collective wound to the surface. At the beginning of the movie each one of them has a different form of denial about Frankie's death. Johnny is numb, no longer able to laugh or cry, he spends his days going through the motions of life. Sarah has reacted by thinking only of her two remaining children, constantly pleading with Johnny to 'pretend to be happy for the girls'. As a desperate measure to replace Frankie, she gets pregnant, even though doctors have warned her against it. Christy, the oldest daughter, has internalized her grief. She constantly carries around a camcorder on which she has Frankie's image. Six-year-old Ariel, the family clown, still talks to Frankie.
On their first Halloween in the new world, the girls trick-or-treat at the 'Stay Away' door and it changes their lives forever. Unfortunately it changes the movie as well; the plot veers dangerously close to cheeseville. Mateo seems to have stepped off the pages of a Stephen King book – he's the one with 'the shining'. It is a testament to Jim Sheridan's directing that he doesn't let this flaw in his writing destroy his movie; it remains, in all other aspects, engrossing and true to life.
In America has some funny moments too, but the best thing about it is that in spite of a few clichés, it never gets schmaltzy. It's a tearjerker for sure, but one so organically wrought that it leaves you emotionally drained rather than filled with the sickly sweet glow of pure undiluted sentiment.
