First off, I’m glad Carl is back (see below and his long comment on my diversity post below that).

For myself, I’m less than absolutely certain that Trump won’t get the nomination. Trump’s persistent success, I think, should cause the allegedly responsible Republicans to worry hard, perhaps more productively, about the fate of Rubio. It seems to me that few of the Trump (should he implode or falter) and Carson supporters will end up supporting him. Rubio-Ryan is now perceived as the Republican establishment, and the mood among Republicans/conservatives is rather bitterly anti-establishment. If Cruz wins in Iowa, he will be very difficult to stop. The commentary about Rubio being just conservative enough, the candidate, after all, who’s most likely to win, and so what sensible partisans will choose when they actually vote, seems to me wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, many (three or four) readers have been complaining that I haven’t said much about movies and TV lately. Well, here I go again: See Brooklyn, a beautiful and endlessly subtle drama about the place of selective nostalgia — including its intensely personal form (homesickness) — in modern life.

Our friend Marc Guerra will appreciate its display of a charming Italian-American young man (Tony) from Brooklyn who goes to dances at Irish churches because he really likes Irish girls. And so he goes after not the girl who’s most strikingly beautiful but the one who looks the most distinctively Irish (and is still quite beautiful).

This ordinary guy who is a bit vertically challenged, a plumber who spends much of the day tramping around in sewage, also turns out to be a well-raised perfect gentleman with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a loving desire to be transparent and hide nothing, and a real talent for listening. He transforms the life of a homesick young woman (Eilis) who came to America from Ireland alone. He loves her before she loves him, but there’s no denying she was a ghost in America until she began to be part of his life.

The young woman whom Tony woos patiently and marries goes back to Ireland for a month to be with her mother (who’s all alone after the sudden death of her other daughter). Understandably, Eilis doesn’t tell her mother she was secretly married. But she allows herself to be courted (again with success) by a perfect gentleman of an Irish young man (Tom) – whom she calls “calm, charming, and civilized” — and they reach a point, after Eilis extends her stay, where he assumes she will accept Tom’s proposal in marriage. For reasons I will discuss later, she abruptly breaks it off and returns to America to her Italian husband whom she had pretty much denied (she stops opening the letters she gets from him) and betrayed. And of course the gentleman asks no questions of the lady and is just thrilled to have her back. Eilis chooses her identity as an American wife–as Eilis Fiorello–partly because she has more space to be herself here.

These two guys, someone might say, are too good to be true. They are exactly the type of guys who take their girls home to meet their families and wouldn’t think of forcing themselves sexually on any young lady. In each case, so strong is his love and so disciplined are his manners that the more reluctant (and far less perfect, of course) woman constantly has the upper hand in the relationship.

Not only that: There’s an Irish emigré priest who is the girl’s “Father” — benefactor — in every way. He’s a good priest, a real believer, who has devoted his life to the well-being of the Irish Catholics in America. We see him hosting a huge Christmas dinner for old and destitute Irish-American men, the ones, he comments, who had built New York’s roads and bridges and so forth. He invites one of the men to sing; his is a Gaelic tune full of homesickness and unrequited longing. The men (and Eilis who’s volunteering there) dissolve into tears. The priest is the film’s third perfect gentleman, in his own way a lady’s man and the opposite of an abuser of children.

The movie is sexual-abuse free! The one sex scene is erotically intense, but clearly an act of reciprocal love (and includes no nudity). It’s in no way a Legion of Decency or puritanical film; there’s just enough cursing to be realistic. And the young people are decent but without, as Tocqueville puts it, chaste minds, and not very religious at all. It’s possible for a film, like a person, to be realistic, hide nothing (from those willing to look), and still not be sordid at all.

I could go on: But when’s the last time you saw a movie when men were portrayed so well? And the ladies come off even better, insofar as they seem smarter and more complicated, funnier and somewhat gossipy, but still (with one exception) good-natured. I’ll say a lot more.

I have to stop for now, but on the selective-nostalgia front: There are reasons to think Ireland is better and worse than Brooklyn. That the early 1950s (the time of the film) are better and worse than now for human character and human happiness. And so forth and so on. I want to emphasize, on this front, how unromantic the film is.