NY Daily News
How the pluck of the Irish made NYC their new 'Home'
Monday, March 17th 2008, 4:00 AM Alan Cooke (here on the Brooklyn Bridge) takes the same journey his ancestors did. "Home." Monday night at 9, Ch. 13. Made over three years with very little money, the documentary "Home" examines New York like a cat. It prowls the perimeter, prowls the interior and checks all the angles before it decides that its initial impression was accurate and it's okay to settle down here for a nap. The nominal thread of the film, and the angle that doubtless got it played on WNET/Ch. 13 for St. Patrick's Day, is the emigration of narrator Alan Cooke from Ireland to New York. That journey has a very different tone in this film, obviously, than did the same journey made by some of Cooke's fellow Irish 140 years ago, when "famine ships" brought desperate people whose primary hope was that their children not starve. Cooke starts with much larger dreams. He and Dawn Scibilia, the film's director, see New York as a place of infinite possibility, a city where the whole human experience comes together to lay out a rich palette of cultures that incorporates everything from food to art. "Home" illustrates this point in two primary ways. First, it travels throughout the city and takes its picture from every conceivable angle - across shimmering water, looking into Times Square, crossing a dark, abandoned downtown street in the early morning. It makes New York look as fascinating as the most buoyant immigrant would always have dreamed. At the same time, Scibilia films New Yorkers talking about their town. Woody Allen is a little cryptic, Susan Sarandon is effusive, Pete Hamill talks about how Irish and African cultures came together in the Five Points around 1840 to create tap dancing. Fran Lebowitz is annoyed over gentrification, but hey, at least this answers the question of what happened to Fran Lebowitz. What differentiates this from another attractive filmed homage to New York are the reflections by Cooke and other speakers like Malachy McCourt about what people leave behind to come here. McCourt explains the parts of Ireland that remain with him, like the way of speaking. Cooke speaks about more concrete things, like missing his family and his friends and the land. In the end, that's the real rumination of this film: What exactly is "home"? Scibilla and Cooke never treat that as a black-and-white question. But to the extent it can be a place, they cast a strong vote for New York.
