Jim Sheridan's drama "In America" about a family of Irish immigrants making a life for themselves in New York is a sentimental tear-jerker that failed to make me cry.
Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine star as parents Sarah and Johnny. They have two lovely girls, the real life sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger who give terrific performances as the impish Christy and the serious, camcorder-wielding Ariel. They live in a run down crack house, a crazy, mansion-like building with wide halls, enormous banisters, and peeling paint that's filled with mysterious neighbors, including Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), a majestic black man and artist wasting away of a then-unknown disease, AIDS. Money is scarce, the summer heat is sweltering, and the family has yet to recover from the loss of their son Frankie.
The set-up is perfectly fine. The cast is marvelous. In one successful heart-wrenching scene, Paddy (Considine) gambles the family's fortune to win his young daughter an E.T. doll at a street fair. As the desperate father tossed balls into a seemingly impossible trick basket, the sad mother looking away, the neighborhood crowd cheering, the eldest daughter silently casting her prayers, I wanted to hide my eyes, as if watching a scene from a horror movie.
But it's all downhill from there. "In America" is supposedly set in the 1980s (we know this because of the importance of Spielberg's E.T. to the story), but the film looks absolutely contemporary, from the clothes to the bright lights of Time Square and Ariel's compact camcorder. When Sarah discovers she is pregnant, "In America" slips into soap opera mode. Samantha Morton left me breathless with her performance in last year's "Morvern Callar," but there is little she could do with the role of long suffering Irish mother. I had to wince as she cried "save the baby, save my baby."
