In America

Jim Sheridan has done a number of films in his native Ireland that you may be familiar with (chief among these is In the Name of the Father). This one is his autobiographical piece. Not completely, but enough so that it actually loses some narrative cohesiveness because of it. He lost his son and moved to America and those are the two important personal notes in this piece. The film is a number of different things: a love letter to America, particularly Manhattan, and our melting pot diversity, as well as a meditation on living and dying and the power of belief, forgiveness and forgetting. It might be because he's trying to do so much with the film that it didn't hold together as beautifully as expected, but that isn't to say that it's not a sweet film. It's sad and funny and enjoyable, and that makes it something to go see. The acting is uniformly amazing, particularly Paddy Considine as the dad, a new face in acting, and I hope this film bodes well for him because I want to see him in many more things.

year: 2002
length: 107 min.
rating: 3.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298845/combined