Charming illegal aliens face family upheaval

At the start of In America, Sarah and Johnny Sullivan arrive at the US-Canadian border in a swaybacked station wagon with their two daughters in the back seat. They are from Ireland, and they are coming to the US illegally so Johnny can find work as an actor and they can start over after the death of their young son, Frankie.

With the help of their surviving children, the chirpy Ariel and the watchful, reserved Christy, they manage to charm their way past a suspicious immigration agent, who decides to believe that they are carefree vacationers rather than desperate migrants.

This modest, touching film accomplishes a similar sleight of hand. The family drives wide-eyed through Times Square and alights in a cavernous, battered walk-up apartment that is quickly spruced up with colorful paint and scavenged furniture. The neighbors are a mostly harmless collection of addicts, hustlers and ordinary poor folk, as well as a reclusive painter named Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), who seems to be dying of AIDS and whom the girls befriend one Halloween.

Many of the elements in this film -- the picturesque poverty; the angelic, doomed man; the dead child; the hard-working, sorrow-afflicted parents; the cute, precocious daughters; the risky pregnancy toward the end -- seem to promise a sticky bath of shameless sentimentality. But instead, thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.

Sheridan has accomplished this trick before, turning stories that might have otherwise foundered in maudlin excess into sharp, engrossing character studies. My Left Foot, about the disabled artist Christy Brown, might have easily been a hectoring, smiley-faced treatise on the plight of the handicapped, just as In the Name of the Father might have been a lecture on the plight of Irish political prisoners and The Field a soapbox harangue on the plight of small landowners.

But Sheridan is more interested in particular people than in general plights, and what lingers in the mind after you have seen his movies is the rough, radiant individuality of his characters.

It helps that Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton, who play Johnny and Sarah, are not well-known movie stars, and that neither is much inclined toward ostentation.

Morton, her hair cropped short and her enormous eyes stung with grief, seems to haunt the edges of the frame until you realize that the blunt, inarticulate force of her feeling is at the center of the developing drama.

Considine, with his gaunt, droopy features and darting eyes, guards Johnny's privacy behind a facade of genial good spirits.

That the two of them remain somewhat mysterious is fitting, because the movie, which Sheridan wrote with two of his daughters, perceives them largely through the eyes of their children.

The family survives through an unspoken pact of mutual protection that becomes plain to us only as it starts to unravel. The girls, played by real-life sisters, Emma and Sarah Bolger, agree not to notice how much their parents are suffering and to distract them from it as best they can.

In America is Sheridan's most personal movie so far -- just how personal will become clear when you see the dedication at the end -- and he is too modest to turn his family's experiences into a parable of anything larger.