I’ve seen “The Immigrant” three times, and I still don’t know what it’s about. The story of this new film by James Gray—which premièred at Cannes a year ago, was screened at the New York Film Festival last fall, and is finally getting its long-overdue release today—is actually straightforward and clear. I wrote a capsule review in the magazine and pulled the plot together in a couple of sentences that can be condensed even further. Marion Cotillard plays Ewa, a Polish woman who arrives at Ellis Island in 1921 and is spotted by Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a pimp who recruits her as a prostitute. To escape that way of life, she prepares to follow his cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner), a magician, out West.
There’s a lot more to it—including the presence of Ewa’s tubercular sister, Magda, who remains quarantined at Ellis Island, and for whose upkeep and release Ewa works—and Gray unfolds the strands of the plot with pellucid precision and in evocative detail. His reconstruction of the teeming and striving, grimy and grim Lower East Side of 1921 is both compact and vast. He conjures a deep and panoramic view of the city by means of implications and incidentals.
The details of the film—which Gray co-wrote with the late Ric Menello—are majestically coherent and picturesque. (Gray spoke with me last year about his friendship and collaboration with Menello, an extraordinary cinephile.) Gray presents the world of the Lower East Side prostitutes—their “pageant” in a restaurant, their competition for Bruno’s favor, their neoclassical bathhouse straight out of Ingres, their backstage preparations at the burlesque show and the sad pomp of their onstage exhibitions, adorned with colors and expressions from Toulouse-Lautrec. He captures the whiplash wiles of hardscrabble underdogs and the bitterly ironic and violent ricochets as their schemes turn against them. All of this is enriched with psychological depths that ripple through the subtly unbalanced compositions.
Yet, in a strange and entrancing way, “The Immigrant” fulfills a distant dream, that of Flaubert’s 1852 fantasy of “a book about nothing, a book without external attachments, which would hold together on its own by the internal force of its style.” “The Immigrant,” for all its meticulous detail and dramatic nuance, turns naturalism inside out. Gray proves—as he has always proved—that what matters isn’t frames and cuts, story lines and character traits, but the melodies and harmonies, the moods and tones that arise from them, and that, in turn, seem to deflect, distort, shudder, and shatter them.
Gray’s movie supersedes—as most good films do—the very notion of form. On the surface, “The Immigrant” channels the nearly oppressive solidity and narrative streamlining of the Hollywood movies of the late nineteen-thirties—the tightly strung studio mechanisms that Orson Welles would soon gleefully unwind and re-tangle. Gray renders classical cinema even more monumental and painterly than the works at its source, but the solidity of his frames is broken by the crude, indelicate, furious emotions under the surface. Only a fault line shows here or there, until there’s a tectonic explosion. Then the movie barely recovers its poise and lurches with a stifled agony toward its exalted, open-ended conclusion.
The central experience of “The Immigrant” is the flow of time. Although the action moves ahead inexorably, the feel of the movie’s time churns in many directions. It isn’t necessary to know that Gray based the movie loosely on family stories—centered on the motley crew that frequented Hurwitz’s, the bar that his great-grandfather ran in that era, and on his great-aunt’s tales of the neighborhood pimp—to get a sense of the movie’s unifying flux of past and present. The mythical world of immigrant ancestors evokes a sort of Western for families whose westward trail came in the twentieth century, by ocean, from Eastern Europe. Gray exposes the violent and filthy underbelly of that legend, which, for all its revelations, never loses its thread of mythology spun on the wing.
The spectre of studio-era classics underlying “The Immigrant” redoubles its mythological power. The film has, in effect, a palimpsest cast from Hollywood’s golden age on the brink of the Second World War. Ewa would be played by Sylvia Sidney or Paulette Goddard (depending on whether the emphasis would be on vulnerability rising to boldness, with Sidney, or on Ewa’s implacability, with Goddard revealing its fissures). Bruno would be Paul Muni (calculating age yielding to emotion) or John Garfield (tragically impulsive youth), and the snappy, sentimental Emil would, of course, be James Cagney. Instead, Gray’s actors are moderns, and among the best. They’re in the front line of modernity in performance, and their presence, written back into the cinematic history of classic Hollywood and into the social history of ancestral New York, suggests that we Big Apple children of immigrants—and of the culture that they created—haven’t fallen as far from their hastily replanted tree as we might think or expect.
Phoenix is the most furious and vulnerable of actors, who brings a self-punishing concentration to his every performance while retaining a hard shell of opacity and a pugnacious physicality that renders his moments of spiritualizing grace a sudden near-transcendence. And Cotillard, with her alabaster skin and laser gaze, embodies Ewa’s irresistible allure, though it isn’t where one would expect to find it. Her power isn’t sex or beauty; it’s the exquisite dignity of her ruthlessness, a cool and composed audacity that sublimates her ferocious will into the sense of a higher calling. What Ewa elicits from Bruno and Emil isn’t desire or love; it’s admiration, even veneration—she’s a better high-stakes gambler than Bruno, a more adept escape artist than Emil, and they pay homage to her superiority, one that she preserves beneath a serene, tightly controlled mask of humility.
Gray composes the film with overtones and reminiscences, with a visual music that links story and character, gesture and voice to personal fears and passions, impulses, and memories. Its power is nearly psychoanalytical in its fusion of memory and time. The societal panorama seeping in at the edges—the raw and corrupt world of poverty and despair, unresponsive or indifferent government institutions, a moralistic society with a thriving sex trade, the overt hypocrisy of Prohibition, an involuted urban tangle of psychic and physical violence—becomes a matter of family and history, of movie love and the daily news, of dreams that veer to nightmares. And yet these stories are irresistible to recall and urgent to tell.
It’s a mistake to think that a fractured chronology or surrealistic doings make a film more modern or progressive. The modern is the spirit of ambient breakdown, of shattered identity, of irreconcilable extremes and insurmountable fragmentation. “The Immigrant,” a most clear and concrete movie, burrows into the unconscious like fleetingly remembered melodies. Its images and moods are cinematic earworms, ready to emerge—and to inspire—unbidden. For all its historical density and specificity, “The Immigrant” is among the most painfully and powerfully intimate of movies.
