I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list. It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk. Always susceptible, I cried a full quart. Samantha Morton, familiar from her role as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, is endowed with the most expressive face in the history of cinema, and the director of In America, Jim Sheridan, is smart enough to take advantage of her features.
The story is not unfamiliar -- immigrants in America, culture-clash and assimilation, poverty and a bit of triumph at the end. he film skirts dangerously close to cliche and occasionally falls over the precipice -- I'm sorry but I've seen too many movies in which an emotionally-stunted hero waits until the final frame before he breaks into tears.
In America is at heart a drama about replacing the dead child. Johnny and Sarah Sheridan lost a boy to a brain tumor and they've been off balance ever since. They're not going to be whole until they make another baby. Sarah's pregnancy is precarious and the parturition difficult, and in a contrived piece of hoakum, the baby doesn't begin to thrive until the suffering soul of a dying friend is mystically infused into her.
No thought is given (nor should it be) to the poor baby, whose whole life will be colored by her entrance into the world as savior and redeemer and who will be freighted with expectations that she will never be able to fulfill.
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