There is nothing exalted about In America, writer and director Jim Sheridan's movie about an immigrant family scarred by a child's death. Sheridan (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) has made a wrenching soap opera for the poor, based loosely on Sheridan's memory of his late brother, to whom this picture is dedicated, who died of a brain tumor.

Losing one's son or brother to cancer is a devastating blow to a family, and Sheridan dramatizes the survivors' pain frame by frame. The Irish family arrives via Canada, with mother (Samantha Morton), father (Paddy Considine) and their two daughters, spunky Ariel (Emma Bolger) and her hardened older sister, Christy (Sarah Bolger). They make their way to Manhattan in an old station wagon, trying to escape the lingering memory of their dead son and brother.

The newcomers settle in a dismal apartment building for drug addicts and malcontents, ostensibly the only place they can afford, though they scrape enough pennies together to send the girls to Catholic school. Why they chose expensive Manhattan over Milwaukee is a question best unasked; Sheridan presents their poverty as an absolute.

The Irish immigrants struggle. Unemployed actor Dad has trouble reaching within himself to pretend. Working mom is burdened. The kids yearn to belong during a Halloween costume contest.

As they find new jobs and friends, they become involved with a mysterious neighbor named Mateo (a good role for actor Djimon Hounsou, best known for playing Cinque in Amistad). Mateo's Christ-like yet earthly presence is the moral center of In America, which holds that only those with faith that good is possible can triumph over loss. Magical Mateo is the impetus to whether they can believe in something again.

Sheridan's passion for his script—which he wrote with his daughters Kirsten and Naomi—elicits strong performances, each powerful in its own way. Among the most moving scenes is the father's feverish attempt to win a toy for his daughter at a carnival—Steven Spielberg's E.T. provides symbolism. In America is best when portraying the family's moments together.

Movies like this are a reminder that the culture has changed and not for the better. Told through a child's eyes, In America reflects today's notion of the child as miniaturized adult. The days when movies depicted childhood as primarily the child's domain—from Shirley Temple's Littlest Rebel to Macaulay Culkin being Home Alone—aren't being made. It is the wounded parents, not the darling girls, who are Sheridan's focus. The children, deprived of functional parents, are the means to their ends.

Some might call that realism, and there's no denying that families like this exist, but it contradicts the movie poster—false advertising at its worst. Standing at the edge of the river overlooking a twinkling Manhattan skyline, the family in the poster observes an America with fireworks, stars and stripes and a bridge to the land of the free—the promise of joy.

The poster's shining city bears no relation to Sheridan's bleak, filthy New York, where poor is inherently profound, where stockbrokers are contemptible and where Irish immigrants are not to be judged for letting their daughters live in squalor among thieves and drug addicts. For Sheridan, America may be synonymous with the power of believing in something good, and that's a point. But the final effect is less stirring than contrived. Scott Holleran