"In America"

As an American Culture Studies person, and also a film studies nut, any film with a title like "In America" holds a great deal of attraction and deserves some attention. In addition to the attraction of the title and a contemporary immigration story, the critical response to this film make it highly fascinating.

Last week, graduate school forced me into a small breakdown. No, not the kind with Kurt Russell, but I was getting very frustrated with the continuous academic focus of my life. I love the academy as much as any other insane person, but sometimes we all need a chance to switch off the constant drone of critical approaches and just enjoy a story.

Now I am going to try to avoid delving into a the genres of film review or from a critical perspective when I talk about Jim Sheridan's "In America". Rather I would like to give an idea of my experience of engaging with this beautiful film.

In "In America" Sheridan tells a semi-autobiographical story of an Irish family moving to America following the death of their son, Frankie. Though many films would make the death of the son and the tendency to blame each other and oneself for his death, Sheridan picks up on the family in the midst of recovery (a la "Ordinary People" but with way fewer WASPs). So there we are, as an audience, introduced to this foursome on the upswing of grief (if there can be an upswing). They are crossing from Canada into the US, illegally I might add, in their beaten up station wagon, and we follow them for roughly a year as they struggle to find a place to live, make enough to stay alive, and come back to some semblance of "together."

I am well aware that this film, on the superficial plot level, seems more appropriate for the movie of the week, but the way it is put together and shifts focus deftly allows us to really see into each character. Once there, we are given a full range of complex emotions or being in a new place and relearning how to associate as four where there once were five.

In tone, at times, I think this film plays more like a more personable version of Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter". The is not just because they both center on groups dealing with purposeless grief, but that is part of it.

At this point, I need to share that my family of five became a four when my younger brother, Peter, died of a rare heart defect (long q.t. wave syndrome, you might have heard of the Maryland b-ball player who just dropped dead on the court after a game), and so in many ways, I cannot separate my experience of the film from my own experience. However, in many ways, "In America" touches on issues of humanity without drifting far into the melodramatic.

Many films deal with the complexity of life and death in simple ways: there was an overarching purpose, there is a need for revenge (through violence or legal means), there is the carnival of pain, etc. This does not meet my personal experience with grief (being someone who has attended more funerals of friends than weddings has something to do with this). I do all of the normal things. I think the thoughts. I pray the prayers. I sit in grief groups' meetings, but what Sheridan does is deal with the fact that at some point, you must make a decision to either move on or remain in your grief.

Sheridan deals with death and grief on a level that does not deny the need to remember those who are gone, but he does not either feel the need to memorialize them. At the end of the film, the narrator's face, Christy(Sarah Bolger), is shown briefy on screen before fading to the New York skyline. She asks if we remember her face. She then says that she wants to rememeber her brother and Mateo (Djimon Hounsou, one of my favorite actors), their neighbor who dies of AIDS, in the same way.

I have been in the middle of a seminar on memory, history, and identity. So, I thought hard to remember what she looked like, and the image had been there just seconds before. The film does not say that memory is perfect. It holds no panacea for emotion or grief, but it does allow us a luxury that is rare in today's digital age. It allows our minds to soften the edges of grief in time. Maybe remembering everything is not the goal. Emmanuel Levinas writes about a form of ethics that is based on the remembering the face of the "Other" who has died, but it is not a clutching to the hereafter. It is the acceptance of the responsibility that the possibilities symbolized by those faces. It is keeping in mind that others are "Others" and taking on their labor as our own. I know that I promised to try to not be "intellectual", but it is hard.

There are a great number of things that I would like about this movie, and this is not to say that the film can be saccharine as moments, but films like "In America" present the power of film to allow for a connection at the same time as it forces some distances.

I will be writing more thoroughly, and in a more organized fashion in an article that I am compiling that looks at "In America" from a memory standpoint for the Society for Reflective Consumption. www.consumeandreflect.org This has been an excellent opportunity to get some of my thoughts down. Thanks for your time and attention.