THE IMMIGRANT
DIRECTOR: James Gray
CAST: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LN
RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes
RATING: ****
WHILE its subject matter is grim, The Immigrant is just so beautifully presented, painting as it does a picture of the nasty side of the American Dream. It exposes the dinginess but does so on a magnificent scale.
This is a time we only now know through pictures, and many of those are either monochromatic or sepia-tinged. But the wretched experience of Ewa Cybulska (Cotillard, pictured) is still repeated today as human trafficking continues.
Ewa is a Polish immigrant, literally fresh off the boat in 1921 New York. She is forced to leave behind her sick sister and most of the film is centred on what she does to get Magda (Angela Sarafyan) off Ellis Island.
Ostensibly aided, but as we realise from the beginning, manipulated by charismatic Bruno Weiss (Phoenix), she is forced into prostitution. Her relationship with Weiss is further complicated when she meets his cousin Emil (Renner), also known as Orlando the Great.
Cotillard gives a wonderfully understated performance – Ewa doesn’t say much, her whole motivation for everything she does is to find a way to help her sister. She is economic in her movements and strikes an impressive balance between surface fragility because of her precarious position and underlying toughness of character to see the job through. Her sadness, resilience and bitterness all comes through in her eyes and contrary to expectation she actually becomes more and more beautiful as her spirit is refined by all her tribulations.
Her struggle to maintain her dignity is echoed in various small ways by the women around her in the same position, but the big difference seems to be that she refuses to see herself as chattel or that this is the sum total of what she can be.
Phoenix’s character is just as complex – he really doesn’t have a problem in using her in the way he does, seeing his obsession with her as love and coming across as truly believing that he has her best interests at heart.
The third part of the triangle – Renner as the potential romantic interest – presents the pragmatic side, the one who sees beyond Ewa’s circumstances, to who she is, not what she does.
Just how far Ewa will go and how many bad things she will do in the name of trying to do a good thing turns it into a morality tale of sorts, especially when she points out that she is learning a valuable lesson about forgiveness. But, ultimately, Gray has made more of a gorgeously filmed period piece which takes us right back to the look of 1930s Hollywood’s golden era.
The cinematography is made up of golden light and deep dark shadows – the director of photography literally recreates the look of an old film through a process of underexposure, recreating the faded realism of old photographs of the early 1900s which have taken on the guise of paintings almost a hundred years later.
Laced with a quiet desperation, the film never exploits Ewa’s situation as a prostitute, suggesting rather than showing, but it does remind you that not everyone’s American Dream is idyllic.
If you liked Amour or Two Lovers, you will like this.