Eric Shapiro on the lack of true humanity in James Gray’s latest film.
Here is a filmmaker possessed of rare intelligence, sincerity, and curiosity, with the skill and resourcefulness to attract excellent casts and considerable budgets, along with the ambition to make great films…who keeps making merely pretty good ones. His five feature films are: Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), We Own The Night (2007), Two Lovers (2008), and now The Immigrant.
Fine. I guess that’s possible, James Gray. But the people I know who’ve met with fates they didn’t desire (of whom there are plenty) tend to compensate for their predicament in some way (new-found joys, chemical addictions, denial, bitter humor, etc.) rather than walk around like they’ve been hit in the skulls with anvils.
So now we have The Immigrant. Here the corruption is direct rather than in reverse (which is a start). Ewa (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island from Poland in 1921 with her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Magda is sick, and therefore quarantined. When the local relatives who were supposed to greet Ewa fail to do so, she has no choice but to fall under the wing of Bruno (Joaquin again), a local pimp who regularly bribes every guard at Ellis Island so they’ll keep running errands to move the film’s plot forward.
Now let’s be careful for a moment. This is The Good Men Project, after all. I’m not issuing a criticism because I wanted Ewa to start acting as happy-go-lucky as Patricia Arquette in True Romance. In fact, I commend the director’s choice to never display Ewa’s body in a sexual manner. What I can’t commend is Mr. Gray’s total failure to comprehend the nature of human corruption, which, in order to take place, requires a degree of…corruption.
He wants Ewa to sell her soul and damn herself, yet preserve enough of her moral center to walk around oozing contempt for herself.
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James Gray wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants Ewa to sell her soul and damn herself, yet preserve enough of her moral center to walk around oozing contempt for herself. He ladles the subtext upon the surface, making the self-disgust that should be but a glimmer in Ewa’s eye (and a glimmer which the amazing Cotillard is certainly capable of conjuring) the entirety of her attitude and persona. She hates herself, yet we’re expected to empathize with her. And nowhere in Gray’s moral investigation does the topic of talent factor in (I recall the absence thereof in We Own The Night, as well).
Whether or not Ewa is skillful at the job she’s shoehorned into is irrelevant to the filmmaker. Again, I didn’t care to see her go to work, but considering this is the function she embraces en route to freeing her sister—considering this is a tragedy about using one’s lowermost facilities in the course of ensuring one’s survival — omitting the machinations of her work seems a little shortsighted. When Michael Corleone got corrupted in The Godfather, we were chilled to our cores because his transition was so logical: He started off as a soldier, then switched to a murderer. Kind of a fuzzy line between the two. The very skills he’d picked up in the military became incredibly useful in the context of a criminal empire. The irony is sickening — and epic.
In The Immigrant, the physical scale yearns and reaches for the epic, but the intuitive and emotional scale keeps diminishing before our eyes. Cotillard wrenches up exquisite naturalism, giving an outstanding performance that very nearly masks the crippled script she’s working from. Phoenix agonizes and implodes with bruising method angst. Jeremy Renner shows up as Orlando the Magician, a kind of gentleman-simpleton after Ewa’s heart, and gets me thinking he might be the best actor we have now that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is gone.
“When I saw The Godfather on its 25th anniversary at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood, I had never seen it in a theater, with an audience. At the end, when Michael Corleone lies to his wife after having murdered everybody, including his brother-in-law — she says, “Is it true?” and he says, “No.” And the audience broke out into applause. It was very instructional. Because it’s not a joyous moment; it’s a heartbreaking moment. And yet the structure of the story is so ironclad that he’s the king, and you must respect him. The movie is genius, but it often gets misread, I think.”
Now, I certainly wasn’t there to witness those applause like James Gray was, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that they did not stem from joy. They probably stemmed — as applause for drama tend to do — from the eruption of truth upon the screen. The audience wasn’t conjoined in some mass convulsion of evil; they were acknowledging the perfection with which Michael’s corruption had been depicted.
For in Michael, for a moment, they saw the worst of themselves. I look at Ewa in The Immigrant and I see nothing.