At the start of James Gray’s sombre half-masterpiece, “The Immigrant,” Ewa Cybulska (Marion Cotillard) sails past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. It’s January, 1921, and Ewa and her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), arriving from Poland, are both in trouble: Magda is found to have tuberculosis, and is sent to the infirmary, while immigration inspectors mysteriously accuse Ewa of having displayed “low morals” on the voyage, and threaten to deport her. Suddenly, a gent in a dark coat and a bowler, named Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), presents himself, bribes the guards, and takes Ewa to a building on the Lower East Side, which is the center of a small empire that he runs. Across the hall from his apartment, Bruno boards a few women who perform nightly in a rowdy little theatre nearby—a burlesque house that also serves as a speakeasy and a brothel. Ewa, friendless and broke, and stunned by this abrupt entry into America, joins the ragtag troupe. What else can she do? Bruno says that he’s the only one who can get Magda released from the infirmary. Alternating politeness and menace, and an odd kind of strangled adoration, he pushes Ewa into prostitution.
Ellis Island appears at the end of Elia Kazan’s “America, America” (1963), as a sign that the Old World hardships of its young hero are over and a triumphant life in America is about to begin. In “The Godfather: Part II” (1974), the child Vito Corleone arrives at Ellis, which becomes the launch point of a narrative that lifts the Corleone clan to the summit of criminal wealth and power. Gray doesn’t quite reject the anything-is-possible immigration story—the prospect of triumph is always there in “The Immigrant”—but he illuminates its corners, recounts its failures and its absences. Earlier in his career, Gray made such small-bore but forceful movies as “Little Odessa” (Russian Jewish gangsters in Brooklyn), “The Yards” (corruption and violence in the New York subway system), and “Two Lovers” (the attempts of a Brooklyn Jew to win the love of a blond beauty). Now he projects his knowledge of New York’s lower depths and his serious, ardent temperament back to the old neighborhoods of the immigrant Lower East Side.
The physical look of the movie is a revelation of a lost past. In one scene, Ewa sits in a bathhouse with some of Bruno’s performers—fleshy, amiable “fallen” women—and the image, cast in an even, yellow light, by the great cinematographer Darius Khondji, would fit easily among classic genre paintings of female bathers. Onstage, the women, in costumes that barely hang on their bodies, barrel through tawdry musical routines devised by Bruno, who considers himself a showman. Such moments have a rumpled, strained cheerfulness reminiscent of the bedraggled moods that Robert Altman achieved in the frontier brothel scenes in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971). Khondji shoots all his scenes with a subdued color palette that resembles the delicate tones of early-twentieth-century autochrome photographs. In a desperate turn, Bruno dresses the women up, takes them to Central Park, and tries to pimp them as daughters of the town’s élite—the Fricks, the Vanderbilts. The undernourished color, lacking warmth and brightness, brings out the yearning for a status out of reach.
Thrown into these dim revels, Ewa withdraws into herself, and Gray stays close to her emotions of pride and shame. Will she be a heroine of the immigration story, or a victim of it? The beautiful Cotillard has a pale, oval face and soft blue eyes. She holds herself in, and we wait for her to explode at Bruno, who, it turns out, is one of the more engrossing characters in recent movies. Intensely self-conscious, he wants Ewa for himself, and he goes into jealous fits when his cousin, Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician and a lightweight charmer, takes an interest in her. But something holds Bruno back. He’s a tormented scoundrel, an exploiter who wants to be a lover, even a husband. Joaquin Phoenix, with his deep-set eyes and his malign jaguar smile, has a gift for unhappy, confounded men caught between aggression and chagrin. In “The Master” (2012), as the emotionally chaotic disciple of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s religious huckster, his turbulence may have been more than the director, Paul Thomas Anderson, knew what to do with. The movie trailed off irresolutely, perhaps cast askew by Phoenix’s fervent incoherence. He’s a brilliant, unstable actor, and this time he struggles to carry the show.
A dedicated artist like Gray runs the danger of becoming so fixed on a single obsessive relationship that he forgets that a movie requires at least a few more good ideas. That’s what happened, I think, with his conception of Bruno as a corrupt protector and Ewa as a superior victim—a woman who sleeps with men for money but remains spiritually immaculate. (“The Immigrant” was partly inspired by “Suor Angelica,” Puccini’s opera about an anguished nun.) The idea is so noble that it becomes dull. In the great D. W. Griffith film “Broken Blossoms” (1919), made just before Ewa’s arrival in America, Lillian Gish plays a sexually threatened young woman, and she uses her eyes, her hands, and her body in lyrical flights of panic that overwhelm an audience even now with the pathos of embattled innocence. In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.
It’s a relief when Gray returns to Ellis Island, where no less a personage than Enrico Caruso (Joseph Calleja) shows up and sings, as part of a performance put on for the detainees, some of whom may be deported. (This actually happened.) In the tale of Ewa Cybulska, Gray may have found a strain of betrayal in the immigration story. But that story is incomplete, as he recognizes, without acknowledging something else: the careless, perverse generosity of a country ready to offer entertainment to anyone who may, or may not, be enlisted into the quick-march of its rush to glory.
In the charming and stirring “Belle,” set in late-eighteenth-century England, and suggested by a true story, two beautiful cousins, Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon) and Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), live together as loving friends under the protection of their great-uncle, Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), the Lord Chief Justice, and his wife (Emily Watson). Corseted and cosseted, the girls have been raised in splendor at Kenwood House, the Mansfield home in Hampstead. As they enter the society marriage market, a cynical aristocrat (Miranda Richardson) evaluates them as potential prizes for her sons, and we can’t help thinking of Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, among other Jane Austen heroines, in their struggle for love and dignity. “Belle” doesn’t come close to Austen’s wit, but, in the Austen manner, the movie is highly conscious of such things as class, fortune, and standing, as embodied by Georgian halls and lawns and stiffly formal manners that give way, at times, to annihilating rudeness.
Race is no more than minimally present in Austen’s work, though she may have named “Mansfield Park” for Lord Mansfield, who ruled in a number of slavery cases. But it’s central here. Dido is the daughter of Mansfield’s nephew, a sea captain, and his African slave mistress, who has died. Though raised by the Mansfields as a member of the family, she’s denied a place at the table on grand occasions, while people outside the family, with varying degrees of shock, refer to her as “the mulatto.” When her father dies, he makes her an heiress, and this young woman who, in different circumstances, would have been someone else’s property is now capable of conferring property of her own on a needy upper-class suitor.
“Belle” was directed by Amma Asante, and written by Misan Sagay, who got the idea for the story when she came across a 1779 portrait of Elizabeth and Dido posing side by side as apparent equals. Since not much is known about the historical Dido, the filmmakers, with an eye to romantic fancy and liberationist desire, concocted a rousing fiction. In their telling, Dido becomes fully conscious of herself as a black woman after listening to the fiery anti-slavery rhetoric of a parson’s son (Sam Reid), who falls in love with her. (Dido’s actual husband was a Frenchman employed as a gentleman’s steward.) The two then work to influence Mansfield’s judgment in a famous case of 1783, in which slave traders intentionally drowned their human cargo at sea, and then demanded insurance payment for lost property. The movie is a moralized historical fantasy, mixing love and politics in Old Hollywood style. Yet I can’t bring myself to be indignant about its inventions. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was born in Oxford and has acted since she was a child, speaks her lines with tremulous emotion and, finally, radiant authority. Austen, I think, would have been thrilled. ♦
