Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan and Domhnall Gleeson

Runtime: 112 minutes

THERE is a scene in John Crowley’s lovely, melancholic Brooklyn where the heroine is leaving home in Ireland for New York. There she stands at the ship’s rail while below, on the quayside, her mother and sister gaze upwards.

One might think this setting sail for a new life was a cause for celebration, but there are no flags being waved here. The three look almost mournful, torn between grief and longing: grief at parting, longing that the situation was otherwise. It is a reminder, if one was needed in these days of tragic millions marching across borders, that the migrants’ lot is often a complex one, where hope mixes with heartache, optimism with realism.

Colm Toibin’s 2009 novel was unusual in that it used a young woman, Eilis Lacey, to stand for a generation of Celts who left home to seek their fortunes abroad. It was deeply political but never heavy-handed, and it was moving in a way that only a personal story can be. Crowley, director of Boy A, has wisely taken his cue from Toibin’s approach, delivering a picture that is a lot like its young heroine - sometimes fragile as bone china, other times tough as steel.

In this, he is helped immeasurably by Saoirse Ronan, who plays Eilis with a quiet passion and intensity. When first we meet her she is walking to chapel in the dark. It is Fifties Ireland and the grocery shop where Eilis works has to be ready for the crowds coming from morning mass. With unemployment rife, Eilis is lucky to have the job, even if she does have a horrible, purse-lipped boss. But Eilis’s mother and older sister believe she can do so much better. So together with the local priest, they fix it so that Eilis gets a prized ticket out of Ireland for America, where a job in a department store awaits.

Now all she has to do is get there. Not for Eilis a transatlantic flight - she goes third class, by boat, seasick most of the way. Once in America another malady hits her - terrible, awful, homesickness. But she is in the same boat as her housemates, all young Irish women looked after by landlady Mrs Kehoe (Julie Walters slipping into an Irish accent like it was a silk slipper). Slowly, surely, things start to change for Eilis, but fate has bigger plans for this small life.

Nick Hornby writes the screenplay with a deft, sensitive touch. After the recent Wild and the forthcoming Love, Nina, the writer once so identified with lads’ literature really is coming into his own as a writer of solid, three dimensional female characters. Through careful selection of incidents, he guides the viewer through Eilis’s change from girl to woman.

Crowley, meanwhile, does wonders in creating the Ireland and New York of the times, his palette changing from foggy hues on one side of the Atlantic to vibrant shades on the other, as if he is raising the light levels with a dimmer switch. This being working class Brooklyn, there are no cliched shots of Manhattan skyscrapers accompanied by clarinets blaring. Eilis, it is clear, has left one small, enclosed world for another.

Part of the joy of the novel was that it was an old-fashioned period piece. Though it had layers and ambiguities, the story went from soup to nuts as they might say in a Brooklyn diner. Crowley’s picture does the same, albeit with some cinematic flourishes here and there. While some might wish he had been more adventurous, shifted the narrative around, adopted a brisker pace, fans of the book will find much to delight in, from Walters’ performance to that of Jim Broadbent as a priest who helps Eilis and Domhnall Gleeson as a friend back home.

Above all, it is hard to see anyone not warming to the way Ronan brings Eilis to life. What a face she has, plain yet beautiful, a blank page on which emotions are written with consummate ease. It is a face wise beyond its years, making it perfect for Eilis, our innocent abroad.