“Two Countries, Two Loves, One Heart”: Adaptation and Ambivalence in Brooklyn

It Is a truth attested by multiple studies that “Returned Yank” depictions cannot escape some form of relationship (wanted or not) with the most famous screen incarnation of the condition: John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952). From its production onward, Ford’s film, as Sinéad Moynihan and others have shown, had outsize influence on the Irish imaginary. Assisted by ubiquitous screenings on St. Patrick’s Day, it continued to dominate international (especially American) conceptions of Ireland and was readily internalized and exploited for the purposes of the Irish tourism industry. The announcement that John Crowley’s 2015 film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s 2009 award-winning novel of Irish diasporic experience, Brooklyn, was to be filmed, in part, in Tóibín’s home town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, provoked local excitement on a par with that in Cong, County Mayo, during the 1951 filming of Ford’s adaptation of Irish author Maurice Walsh’s short story “The Quiet Man.” “Film fever has gripped