The Immigrant

Film (2013)

With Marion Cotillard (Ewa Cybulska), Joaquin Phoenix (Bruno Weiss), Jeremy Renner (Orlando the Magician / Emil)

Ewa (Marion Cotillard) arrives from Poland with her sister at Ellis Island, but her sister is sick and is detained there. Barely getting through immigration barriers herself, Ewa is determined to not only survive but raise the necessary money to get her sister into the United States. Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) takes her under his wing and sets her on a path which supposedly will help her do that, but it is fraught with all sorts of personal challenges.

This film has a good cast, and the subject initially drew me in; but there is some combination of mawkishness and melodrama throughout that put me off.

Marion Cotillard is indeed a very good actress, and, if it were not for her charming and delicate characterization of the fraught but determined Ewa, this film would be even more difficult to swallow.

The writing, in a word, is strange.

We get no real sense about why Ewa and her sister are coming to America. We know they have somehow been affected by the First World War, but they are Polish Catholics, not Jews, and are not fleeing the forms of persecution Jews had to undergo at the time. That initial premise is not terribly clear.

But that is not the biggest problem with the script. There is a very specific kind of nuttiness that prevails in Bruno’s dark and sordid world and this story is about Ewa’s subjection to that. Given that his character is not all that well drawn, it makes for a series of melodramatic ups and downs that cause Ewa to silently and gracefully navigate through the frenzied storms of his mood swings and the problems he causes in all corners of her existence.

Bruno is an emotionally volatile man who runs a “theatrical” enterprise – that doubles as a brothel – into which he brings Ewa. He is meant to be Jewish, but Phoenix’s portrait is not very convincing; there is an extremity of temper and mood, a specialty of Phoenix’s, but very little sense of humor, wit or cultural attributes that would enrich the characterization.

Jeremy Renner (Orlando) plays his cousin, a stage illusionist, and though his portrait is more appealing, it also does not convey much of a believable sense of Jewishness.

Interestingly, director James Gray has Russian Jewish heritage and, according to the production notes, wanted to tell a story that evoked a sense of the world in which his grandparents grew up. Apparently, one of his forbears owned a bar in New York City and some of the story comes from hearing about that history. Apparently he heard about a pimp named Max Hochstim who provided the basis for the Bruno character.

I don’t know why Gray chose to tell the story of a character like that rather than something closer to home; it seems that he was looking more for an extreme dramatic setup than an opportunity to tell a tale with more personal connections.

Even more interestingly, though, is Gray’s operatic inspiration for the film. Apparently, Puccini’s Il Trittico played a strong role in his formation of ideas and images. I am not surprised at all. While watching the film I thought it suffered from many of the narrative limitations that a lot Romantic era Italian opera suffers from. The stories are overblown, over-sentimentalized and have dramatic constructions that are largely unbelievable. I found that,as well, to be true of The Immigrant; it did seem very operatic in that way. Publicity materials for The Immigrant state that “Gray often finds inspiration for his work from the pronounced emotion in the medium’s (opera’s) performances.” That strikes me as right on the mark and exactly the reason that I found the film wanting. Nineteenth century Romantic opera is a medium that often caricatures narrative elements in order to enable a particularly strong and forceful emotion in the music. To that end it works fine; when one enters the opera house to see an Italian opera from the nineteenth century one adjusts one’s narrative expectations to the situation.

In an interview, Gray states: “Through outsized emotions and dramatic situations, there is a greater truth if you will. This is why the film is scored with Puccini, Gounod and Wagner.” It is clear that Gray intended his film to contain these sorts of melodramas and what he calls “outsized emotions.” For him, these help to convey a greater truth; to me they just seemed overblown and ineffective.

As well, Gray states: “Opera conveys emotion in its purest form–without pretense, without cynicism, without irony. It is as close to the human heart as any medium, a direct path to our sympathies. I really tried to push THE IMMIGRANT in this direction.” Clearly, Gray makes the conscious attempt to draw emotion out of the film, but does it so overtly that emotion gets squashed along the way. The greatest emotion in art works gets generated not when an artist seeks to convey emotion but when, through working with a medium, enables the development of characters and situations that draw out an honest response from the audience. Gray seems to have gone about the matter by trying to engineer emotion not actually to express it.

In a contemporary film, utilizing the same tonal framework creates a sense of the extreme and histrionic, and that is exactly as this film came across.

Marion Cotillard, amazingly, speaks Polish in a lot of places and does it extremely convincingly. I’m curious to know how she pulled that off.

– BADMan