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Film Description
A young Irish actor decides to try for a new life in America and moves with his wife and two young daughters to New York City. That's where the film starts and we share the confusion and dislocation of the leads, forced to work at low-paid jobs to make ends meet. Well-cast and well performed.
In America by Jim Sheridan is a very personal film about coping with loss and slowly coming to terms with it. The film is based on Sheridan's personal experiences and ... more >
In America by Jim Sheridan is a very personal film about coping with loss and slowly coming to terms with it. The film is based on Sheridan's personal experiences and he says that "basically, everything that happens in the film happened". In America is told from the recollection of Sheridan's two daughters, Naomi and Kirsten (now in their twenties) and is not meant to be a faithful, realistic depiction of events but a tone poem about what childhood seems like many years later.
The film shows the struggles of the family to find work. Johnny, the girls father, is an actor who goes to many auditions without success and their mother Sarah, a teacher, can only find work in an ice cream parlor. The family is forced to live in a squalid tenement in Manhattan filled with junkies, drug dealers, and transvestites. Frankie, the brother who died of a brain tumor is omnipresent in their thoughts and Christy says that he has told her that he will grant her three wishes when she calls on him.
When Halloween comes, the only place they can go trick or treating is in their own rundown building. Here they meet Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), one of the central characters of the film, a huge black man dying of AIDS who provides the emotional support for the family to go on. When Sarah becomes pregnant, the family is even more haunted by Frankie's death but the prospect of a new life provides the impetus to say goodbye and move on. In America has its flaws but it is warm, charming, and full of wonder and works on a very personal level to remind us that even in the most unlikely circumstances, there is love, generosity, and magic.
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