This was such a sweet little movie, y’all. It’s a romance on paper, but it’s really a meditation on immigration, homesickness, and what does “home” mean.

Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950s Ireland, with no job and no real prospects. Her sister asks an Irish priest in New York to sponsor her immigration to America. She leaves her sister and mother behind, and moves into a boarding house, finds a job in a department store, and tries to settle into her new life. At a parish dance, she meets a nice Italian boy, but when tragedy strikes in Ireland, she needs to decide which place is home- Brooklyn or Ireland.

It’s very sweet. Saoirse Ronan is luminous, and her eyes are just stunning. She conveys all of these emotions- excitement, hope, mourning as the boat leaves Ireland behind, and she gets this journey Eilis is on.

Jim Broadbent plays the priest that sponsored her immigration, and he is kind and gentle and gives this amazing speech on the nature of homesickness. He arranges for her to take bookkeeping classes, partially as a way to get a better job than the store and partially to get her out of the house and into the world. Homesickness is easier to treat if you have something to distract you (can confirm for actual facts).

The romance is sweet but kind of hollow. Tony goes to an Irish parish dance, despite being Italian, because he likes Irish girls. Eilis dances with him and allows him to walk her home, and they slowly begin a very wholesome courtship that involves Coney Island and meeting his family and going to movies. He isn’t really developed; he’s basically a plot device to give her something to want to return to America for.  Other than being of Italian descent, a plumber and a Dodgers fan, we know nothing about his inner life.

It’s okay, because the movie isn’t really about him. It’s about the community you build for yourself while you try to figure out who you are in a new place. The friendships Eilis develops with the other Irish women in her boarding house and with her supervisor at work, and how her relationships with the people left behind in Ireland change is the heart of the story. It’s beautiful watching all of these women interact. Jessica Paré (Mad Men) plays Elis’ boss at the department store, and you totally expect her to be a hard-ass, but instead she provides a quiet support. Emily Bett Rickards (Arrow) is Eilis’ cabinmate on the ship that gives her the ins-and-outs of a transatlantic voyage, and how to get through Customs and Immigration.

Eilis is worried about leaving her mother and sister alone, and worried about being alone herself. After spending her entire life where “everyone knows your auntie,” the anonymity of Brooklyn is both a terror and a relief, and it’s in going home that she remembers how stifling it can be, with everyone in each other’s business amid the pettiness of small-town life.

But the thing I found the most well-done was how, once you leave the place you’ve spent your entire life and go to a new place, you grow in new ways. Your psyche changes shape. And when you go home for a visit, the new parts of you rub on the old place and it’s suddenly like “I don’t fit here anymore” and that’s sad. It’s sad for you and sad for the friends you left behind. (“You weren’t supposed to fall in love with Boston! You were supposed to go ‘This is very lovely but I think I want to go back home now’ and come back to us.” Not said by my mother, thank god, but by a friend.)

But the reality is this: home is home. And you can have more than one and you can have a place where you are more yourself and realizing where that place is can be a process or it can just be a, “Oh, yes, here.  This is the place. This is home.”

Saoirse Ronan has been nominated for both a SAG and a Golden Globe, and I fully expect her to be nominated for an Oscar next month.

After a lot of really bright shiny movies this summer and the heavy fare of the awards season, this is like a lemon sorbet: light and sweet.

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Brooklyn may still be in theatres now and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.