Hidden
somewhere in James Gray’s The Immigrant
is a great film about a waif beaten down by the hardships of the world and who
must find it within herself to keep going. What surrounds these wonderful
elements, however, is a stilted period drama about two unworthy men fighting
over a woman who desires no such emotional dueling.
Make
no mistake, Marion Cotillard is brilliant as the titular Polish immigrant who
comes to America with her sister to find a better life and escape the Great
War. There is a fragility to Cotillard that the Paris-born actress – here playing
a Polish émigré without missing a beat – uses as a strength. A deep well of
pain resides within the character, Ewa, and from that well she draws the power
to devote herself to her cause.
She
and her sister arrive at Ellis Island, and it is clear from the beginning her
sister is not well. Sure enough, she is quarantined and told she will be
deported in six months if her condition does not improve. Ewa is turned away as
a “woman of low morals” and informed she will be sent back to Poland
immediately. She will not leave her sister, though, and determines to do
anything she can to help her sister get off the island. In walks Bruno Weiss, a
usually reliable Joaquin Phoenix, to help her. Thus begin Ewa’s problems – and the
film’s.
There
is much to like about the story of a woman of faith disturbed by the things she
must do to survive and even more disturbed that the ability to do such things
exists within her. Cotillard is naturalistic and brooding, and there is not a
hint of vanity or affectation in her performance. But Gray, with Ric Menello,
has written a film that cannot match her tone.
Cotillard
is taking part in a neo-realist tragedy in the vein of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, a film with similar
themes and even a few shared scenes. The rest of the cast, including Phoenix
and a game, if overmatched, Jeremy Renner, seems to be in a melodramatic period
piece with Vaudevillian pimps (Phoenix) and roguish magicians (Renner).
Phoenix
has several good moments toward the end, and Renner’s Orlando the Magician is
charming in an Errol Flynn sort of way. But both are underserved by a lack of
backstory, either pertaining to them as individuals or to their shared history,
which has created some vague tension that is never satisfactorily explained.
The men fight over Ewa because that is what men do in this type of high drama,
but there is little motivating them aside from the shared love of a woman who
could do as well without either of their attentions.
Gray
reportedly told his wife, upon a viewing of the Puccini opera “Il Trittico,”
filmmakers do not make movies about women anymore such as the classics with Barbara
Stanwyck and Greer Garson. She told him to make one, and he embarked upon The Immigrant. After seeing the film, one
wishes he had hewn more closely to that ideal.
See it? No.
