'In America': Film to take to heart

Lyrical, life-affirming, lovely. In America is a wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had. What happens onscreen to the characters happens offscreen to the audience: Walls erected to protect vulnerable hearts are taken down in order to make a human connection.

Jim Sheridan's film is about an Irish family - father, mother and two young daughters - that tells the authorities it has come to the States on holiday when it is planning to immigrate, legally or otherwise.

The year is 1982. The place is Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. The narrator is 11-year-old Christy (Sarah Bolger), who frames the family's unsentimental journey through the viewfinder of her camcorder. (Literalists, please understand that this is a metaphorical 1982, as the classic-rock stations, family-friendly Times Square, and personal camcorder we see are anachronisms in service of a larger emotional truth.)

There's something off about Sarah's folks. For when the customs agent at the U.S.-Canada border asks how many children they have, her dad answers "three" and her mom "two."

There are two children in the backseat, Christy and Ariel (Emma Bolger, Sarah's sister). But the restless spirit of a third, Frankie, crowds the car and the memories of his kin. Although no longer with them, Frankie has become the family genie, giving Christy three wishes. At critical moments she uses them to ensure her family's safe passage.

As directed by Sheridan (My Left Foot), who wrote the semiautobiographical screenplay with his now-grown daughters, In America is a ghost story in which the living are first haunted and ultimately helped by the dead. Both in its story and in its gritty scenery, vividly captured by cinematographer Declan Quinn, the film is a stirring work of magic realism.

Soon after their arrival, Christy's father, a struggling actor named Johnny (Paddy Considine), finds a crummy loft in Hell's Kitchen encrusted in pigeon poop and possibility. Her mother, Sarah (that life force Samantha Morton, a melding of the ethereal and the earthy), finds a job in an ice cream parlor.

It is a measure of the enormous achievement of In America that the Hell's Kitchen ice cream parlor is called Heaven and no one groans. And that the shaman is an African named Mateo (Amistad's Djimon Hounsou in majestic-mystic mode) whom Sheridan permits to create a character far more complex than the noble Negro of standard Hollywood fare.

As Morton and Hounsou endow the film with a transcendent, catch-a-falling-star magic, those Bolger girls root it in recognizable reality. For Christy and Ariel, being in this strange land with mysterious climatic conditions such as humidity and secular customs such as Halloween is a magical adventure much like E.T.'s visit to Earth.

Although each actor is uniquely powerful, the blessing of Sheridan's movie is seeing them work in ensemble. This is a story that sees the family as a system, attentive to how the pressures on one member cause explosions and implosions among the others.

In part, In America is the story of immigrant hopes, of creating a new life from the ashes of the old. But more profoundly it serves as proof that tortured people can go through hell and come out the other side to find heaven in Hell's Kitchen.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

In America *** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Arthur Lappin and Jim Sheridan, directed by Jim Sheridan, written by Jim Sheridan, Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan, photography by Declan Quinn, music by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 47 mins.

Johnny. . . Paddy Considine

Sarah. . . Samantha Morton

Mateo. . . Djimon Hounsou

Christy. . . Sarah Bolger

Ariel. . . Emma Bolger

Parent's guide: PG-13 (discreet sex, drug references, brief violence)

Playing at: Ritz Five and Ritz Sixteen/NJ