'IN AMERICA' DVD looks at immigrant experience through a child's eyes

Jim Sheridan and his daughters based the movie on his own experiences.
By MIKE PEARSON
SCRIPPS HOWARD
Director Jim Sheridan is best known for tales of heartbreak and defiance.
From "My Left Foot" to "In the Name of the Father," he created an Irish landscape where the human spirit was the very last thing to break.
"In America," his Oscar-nominated take on the immigrant experience, is a different animal. There's heartbreak and defiance -- those things are in Sheridan's blood -- but also something else: A child's eye view of the world that softens it around the edges.
Based in large part on Sheridan's own life (and written by him and his daughters), it's the story of four Irish immigrants who arrive in modern-day Manhattan by way of Canada. Dad (Paddy Considine) is an out-of-work actor; Mom (Samantha Morton) is a determined dreamer. And daughters Christy and Ariel (Sarah and Emma Bolger) are the glue holding the family together. They document their life with a video camera.
As the film opens, life isn't particularly grand. The family is still reeling from the recent death of Frankie, the cherished brother and son who died of a brain tumor. Throw in the fact that they live in a Hell's Kitchen tenement with junkies for neighbors, and it's clear the streets are not paved with gold in this version of the American dream.
Finding hope
Yet there's hope, always hope, found in the most unexpected places. The family is befriended by Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), an artist living downstairs, whose bitterness over the AIDS wracking his body is forestalled when he encounters the young Irish sisters.
An unlikely alliance between newcomers and an old soul gives "In America" its heft and its poignancy. The acting is universally grand, from Considine's anguish to Morton's quiet desperation to Hounsou's heartfelt dignity. Half the time you don't know whether to laugh or cry, so you end up doing both.
If "In America" is sometimes difficult to watch, imagine what it must have been like to direct. For Sheridan, it was almost surreal.
"It took me 10 years to write the film with my daughters, and when I got around to shooting it, it was tough," he said. "Your own path becomes fiction, so you have the disturbing sense that your own self could also be fiction, that the roles we assume in our lives are fictional roles, that tomorrow you could just as easily be Muslim."
Based on father
Sheridan based Considine's role on his own father, a gambler who kept the family on the edge of ruin. Yet he chose to tell his tale through a child's eyes.
"It was about keeping an innocent at the heart of the story," Sheridan said, "and to keep it from being a vanity production. I felt very odd about making a film about myself and being a hero. This allowed me to get distance and make fun of the lead character."
Sheridan is proud that "In America" was the first movie shot in New York post Sept. 11, 2001, and says the city greeted him with open arms. He's also proud of having made a movie about "necessary lies," which is the triumph the characters ultimately achieve.
"I want people to come away with a sense that there's always hope, that no matter what happens in life you can always start over," he said. "You can chase the material side of the American dream and never find it. The real dream is our ability to change."
X"In America," by Fox, is available on VHS and DVD.