No thanks for these memories

A film ostensibly about starting again, Jim Sheridan's In America has Irish emigres Johnny and Sarah (Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton) travelling to modern-day Manhattan, heavy with the memory of their little boy's recent death.

We are taken through the New York seasons - a sweltering summer, an autumn that empties oceans of leaves onto the streets, a winter with people skiing through Central Park. There is a real keenness for New York here, and Sheridan, who clearly adores the place, wants to bring it to us whole.

These moments give the film the feel of the memoir that it is - Sheridan did once move from Ireland to Hell's Kitchen to make a living as a theatre director, bringing his young family with him. But In America comes over as a memory with the truth removed.

The couple's two young daughters, Christy and Arial (Sarah and Emma Bolger), buoy their parents up, swinging around their huge, virtually derelict apartment, casting about for something to occupy them. One talks and talks, the other films things with her digicam. Sheridan often uses this child's-eye-view footage in the film.

Except it never feels as if it is filmed by a child. And these girls don't speak like children either. "I've been carrying this family on my back for a year," complains-12-year-old Christy, with all the blank solemnity of a young actress reading from what seems to her to be a very adult script.

While this is a very personal film, full of Sheridan's real, remembered incidents in shops and ice-cream parlours, it is also full of unreal people talking with a philosophical lisp - the wise kids, the wise Morton, a wise Nigerian aristocrat neighbour dying of Aids.

Sheridan wants to make too much sense of what happens to this family because it is his, not ours. He wants to smooth even the toughest memories into something comfortable and comprehensible. Which makes its rhythm and mood seem like something projected to the wrong music.

In America
Cert: 15