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THE IMMIGRANT
4 out of 5 stars
M, 120 minutes, now showing
Director: James Grey
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Renner
You can capture the plot of The Immigrant, the fine new movie from writer/director James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night), in a single sentence: arriving in 1921 New York, an impoverished Polish immigrant, Ewa (Marion Cotillard), is detained along with her ill sister but then rescued by the calculating Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who draws her into a prostitution racket before his cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner) tries to rescue her.
What's difficult to encapsulate is the vivid emotion that underpins this simple story, or the depths suggested by the close-ups of the remarkable Cotillard that explain her complex state as well as recalling the golden era of 1930s Hollywood cinematography. The masterful director of photography, Darius Khondji (Stealing Beauty, Midnight in Paris), uses grainy texture and diffused light to make the bustling tenements of the Lower East Side feel distinct yet come alive.
Young filmmakers often force experimentation as a means of distinguishing themselves, but Gray has taken a classical subject and movie and made it identifiably his own. The story is simple, the motivations at first glance straightforward, but The Immigrant is full of personal and public detail, revealing a social history of saloons and corrupt cops, public hypocrisy and private deals, and complex relationships.
Phoenix has long been Gray's referred leading man, and after the chameleonic one-two of The Master and Her, his performance here returns to his volatile self-loathing. In his theatre Bruno is a showman, but he genuinely believes in what he does. He pimps Ewa for gain, but also because he lovingly wants to possess her. It's why he's so rattled by Emil's attempts to rescue her.
Renner's lacerating intensity is here supplanted by an almost joyous buoyancy, suggesting new angles to his normally grim face. But it is Cotillard's performance - at once luminous and multi-layered - that shines through and banishes mere melodrama. Her Ewa is never merely a victim who suffers heroically, and you can see her making the odds on each step of her journey towards reuniting with her sister.
The immigrant experience has been part of Gray's work since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, and from the opening shot of the Statue of Liberty the film suggests the reality of building a nation and the small, bitter negotiations that requires. "I like money," Ewa eventually tells Bruno, "but I hate you." That's a line both cruel and understanding - the intersection where this arresting movie resides.
