In America

***1/2 - very good

New York City is a cinema obsession. While hundreds of films have looked at its elements and tried to uncover its mystery, the films of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese might be the most notable. Woody Allen's sarcastic and passionate portrait his the cityscape makes one familiar with the city, as he most obviously is. New York City is Allen's skin, he wears it nervously, but proudly. Martin Scorsese's films on New York span decades, highlighting his desire to uncover what makes his native city cook. While Allen's cynicism oveflows onto everything he touches, including the city of his birth, Scorsese's films display a hatred for its past and present - but also an admiration for the rich, if flawed, history New York has.

I found Jim Sheridan's outsider look at New York to be one that is both fresh, and flawed. While it is about an Irish family who immigrate to the United States, supposedly - evidently like all of his films - having some autobiographical signicance for Sheridan, I'm not sure if that's the point. I am sure that isn't the most involving, with this viewer anyway, element of the film. The necessity of a film involving characters in a new setting, is that the setting itself has to be of some intrigue. Sheridan's strange brew of romanticism and sometimes realism certainly gives the setting some intrigue, but I'm not quite sure in what way.

The romanticism revolves around the fact that two little girls are at its centerpiece. There is conscious effort on behalf of the parents to shield their children from the "real" world - and Sheridan seems to be shielding us at times, and giving us the view given to the children. Not that danger isn't lurking around some corners - even for the older girl it is - but there is a sense of safety felt throughout the film, even though the four live in a building supposedly inhabited by junkies. I've always found the concept parents who have the sense to not let their children grow up too fast to be quite sweet - but there is some saccharine in Sheridan's portrait of New York, as well.