'In America' a passport to unbridled emotion

If you put yourself in the hands of emotion, you have to be willing to go along for the ride, and that goes for filmmakers as well as audiences. Strong, deep emotions cannot be any more easily regulated on screen than they can in life, and a film that traffics in them as wholeheartedly as "In America" is going to shake you up and hang you out to dry if you give it the chance.

Based loosely on Irish director Jim Sheridan's experiences when he and his family lived in New York some 20 years ago, "In America" believes in its people, and, like the supplicant who opens "The Godfather," it believes in America.

The film turns this insider's understanding of the immigrant experience and an unyielding belief in the value of family into a recklessly emotional film that is so committed to feelings it occasionally overflows its banks. Which may be a little messy, but it's a lot more welcome than the drought-stricken alternatives.

Sheridan, best known for "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father," emphasized the personal nature of this film by writing it with the two daughters who lived that Manhattan experience with him, Naomi Sheridan and Kirsten Sheridan. Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine play parents Sarah and Johnny, but this family story belongs completely, body and especially soul, to the pair of child actors, real-life sisters Sarah Bolger and Emma Bolger, who play the family's children, 10-year-old Christy and 6-year-old Ariel. With their antic spirits and priceless smiles, they are the emotional heart of "In America," and it is impossible not to be won over by their charms.

We meet this Irish family of four as they immigrate illegally by pretending to be jolly vacationers from Canada. The nominal reason for the move is Johnny's desire to make it as an actor in New York, but the recent death of the couple's third child, a boy named Frankie, has made a change of scene an emotional necessity as well.

We warm to these people immediately, to careful, watchful Christy, the film's narrator, effervescent Ariel and their worried, decent parents. But when the family enters Manhattan for the first time, with the Lovin' Spoonful's "Do You Believe in Magic" on the soundtrack, and the girls' faces absolutely light up with wonder and joy, that's when we simply fall in love with them.