James Gray specializes in taking crime stories and crossing them with melodrama. Movies like THE YARDS and the unjustly maligned WE OWN THE NIGHT had a sense of near operatic inevitability to their conclusions that mocking Gray became kind of a contact sport. He’s an acquired taste, but I’ve acquired it. THE IMMIGRANT, his latest and clearly most personal movie, is pure melodrama. Its lack of crime story conventions denies it any kind of protection and forces us to deal with the emotional content head-on. The result is a movie with a handful of powerful moment trapped inside what feels like Act One of some kind of epic movie miniseries. Inspired by the stories of Gray’s grandparents arriving at Ellis Island, the movie is an immigrant story without the sepia-toned nostalgia for the American Dream. THE IMMIGRANT is harsh and dirty and grimy. It can also feel like a grind sometimes. Marion Cottillard is Ewa, a proud but lost Polish immigrant who will do anything to keep her sick sister from being deported. This forces her to fall into the hands of Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a seemingly nice gentleman who puts on a burlesque show with other immigrant women that is really a front for prostitution. Cotillard’s specialty is suffering beautifully, and THE IMMIGRANT might be her biggest showcase. The more brutality she endures the purer she seems. That’s a convention of opera, but it causes her character to be a little schematic. Her best scenes are when she fights back and is an active participant in her ordeal. Unfortunately, those scenes don’t occur that often. There are moments when we think she’s bringing this upon herself, even though we know that is certainly not the case. Cotillard’s best scene comes late in the movie when she goes to confession and is told God is punishing her and she agrees. It’s a devastating moment. But the real star of the movie is Phoenix in his best performance in years. He’s been so mannered and off-putting in movies like THE MASTER and HER that I wondered if he could ever go back to the kind of emotionally rich, unaffected acting that made him so exciting to watch. THE IMMIGRANT marks Phoenix’s fourth collaboration with Gray and that tells me Gray gets something about Phoenix that most other directors don’t. In TWO LOVERS, Phoenix gave such an open and raw performance it recalled early Brando. (It remains Gray’s finest movie.) Here, Phoenix still has his trademark temper tantrums and occasional affected speech pattern, but it’s not showy. Bruno’s banal evilness sneaks up on you until a lacerating final scene where his capacity for love and manipulation are fully revealed. The first two-thirds of THE IMMIGRANT are so good that your heart sinks a little when it starts to go off the tracks. The introduction of a third main character messes with the movie’s fragile balance. Jeremy Renner shows up in what can be described as The Paul Dano Role. He’s better than Dano, but the gears of the plot start to show a little too much. Still, THE IMMIGRANT is the most beautifully shot and framed movie I’ve seen so far this year. By the end you are ready for an imaginary second installment of the story. I want to see Gray’s late ‘50s NYC immigrant family melodrama. You know, the one where the first generation of Ellis Island arrivals had woken up to the harsh and cruel realities of the American Dream. (B)
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 00:42:13 +0000