"In America" (2003) features adorable sisters, elementary-school aged, in very difficult circumstances. And that is not the only way in which it shouts, "I dare you to say this is not great stuff!" However, it is not great stuff.
The genre is "magical realism," which is to say, the grinding problems of poverty and illness and frustrated dreams are at the end happily and touchingly resolved. In this particular case, the resolution is achieved with an assist from the magical connection between a family of Irish immigrants to the United States, circa 1985, and a reclusive black artist who is their neighbor in the same squalid Manhattan tenement. In one scene, the girls are sent to the ice cream parlor so that their blindfolded dad can impregnate mom during a thunderstorm while the black artist simultaneously stabs a knife through his paintings. The respective penetrations are juxtaposed in a swirling montage--the "magic," I guess, of magical realism.
At the end, the artist, on his death bed in the hospital with (I think) AIDS , manages, by an exercise of his mind, or something, to push the Irish family's preemie baby, who is languishing in an incubator, over the line from death to life. The baby gets named after the artist, who, we learn when the dad visits the bursar, paid the family's thirty-thousand-dollar hospital bill before expiring.
Put the emphasis on "magical" and don't forget that the adorable girls are sisters in real life.
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