Friday, July 25, 2014

Joaquin Phoenix Shines in "The Immigrant" Movie

The Immigrant is a surprisingly generic title for what is essentially an old-fashioned morality play, ostensibly the story of a young Polish girl who comes to the New World in the twenties with her sister. Grey New York awaits if she can get out of immigration prison and spring her ill sister out of hospital. Almost immediate aid comes in the form of friendly, helpful Bruno, who seems to have some kind of pull with the immigration officials and gets our sad-eyed immigrant out of detention. 
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Bruno,has a few good opportunities to shine (he can move from kindness to fury in a nano-second, and excels as the carny-like host of the burlesque) and one speculates whether the story should have focused instead on his tortured journey. As it is, we get a glimpse of a provocative character but not much more. 
The immigrant story, psychologically, is a rich vein to mine - what quiet or unquiet stories, what individual mind sets lead to someone taking the big step of leaving what they know for new and uncharted worlds?
Alas, I kept waiting for the drama to emerge from behind the shadow play. What we get instead are stock characters. Friendly Bruno turns out to be a pimp who uses a tawdry burlesque show to get customers for his girls.  His kindness turns to menace quickly but then dissipates. 
Marion Cotillard as Ewa is the archetypal heroine whose selfless devotion to her sister and purity seem to be borrowed from cinematic tropes of earlier times. 
It's not the actress's fault that the character seems so bloodless ‎ and passive.   Even when she's on stage and faced with crude insults, she is played as a martyr, stoic in the face of pain. Maybe the movie should have been called The Icon for it never tries to elevate itself above wooden depictions of character. We are supposed to believe in these characters but they seem curiously flat, and as a consequence you don't really find any moral ambiguity in their individual choices, or are persuaded of the redemptive power of love, or forgiveness, as depicted here.
Like the burlesque show Bruno hosts, it's all a pretty come-on. We get a magician, and the great Caruso, for goodness sakes! 
I would have rather had less sleight of hand and more authenticity though, for at bottom if you are going to make a film about The Immigrant, you need to show the dirt beneath the nails, not airbrush the squalor or the desperation,  with genteel sepia overtones.  
‎I won't say the actors are wasted but with the kind of talent they each possess, one waited for the film that could have been. 

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