Era Uma Vez em Nova York

The Immigrant has all the ingredients to be a blockbuster and an excellent movie: great actors, fantastic production, great atmosphere, historical settings, and a touching story about the harshness of immigration in the USA after the WW1 without sugar-coated BS. Yet, for whatever reason, the movie felt flat most of the time to me, and not touching despite the story being a priori very touching.

Phoenix is always great in whatever he does, and he's the only actor whose character I felt and believed to be real in this film. Marion Cotillard is really sweet but, despite the role being written for her, the dramatic coloratura of the script, speaking in Polish, and shedding the perfect tear, her acting feels flat, as if she had taken a muscular relaxant during the film; unfortunately, I didn't think her acting was coming from the heart and it didn't touch mine. I found Jeremy Renner miscast in his role, he has no chemistry with Cotillard on camera and he was never meant to be a rival of the always powerful Phoenix.

The script has no tempo, unfortunately, so it dragged me alone on a two-hour flat ride. You know, the movie is really sad and emotional, but it rarely moved me, intrigued me, or kept me waiting for what was coming next. The movie felt, depending of the times, clichéd, phony, overly melodramatic, a bit frigid, but mostly unfocused and confused, and that's always the director's fault.

Overall, this is a nice film to watch, but it deflates before it gets fully inflated. There are many things I liked about this film, truly, but nothing I really loved, unfortunately.

It's 1921. Polish sisters Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Magda Cybulska arrive in NYC. Magda is quarantined and Ewa is accused of having low morals threatened with deportation. She's desperate to stay and find her sister. Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix) manages the burlesque Bandits' Roost. He zeros in on the vulnerable Ewa and eventually pushes her into prostitution. She tracks down her relatives but her uncle gets the police and she's sent back to Ellis Island slated for deportation. There she sees a performance by Orlando the magician (Jeremy Renner) who turns out to be Bruno's cousin Emil.

This is a beautiful looking film. James Gray is able to achieve that much. The actors are first rate and Marion Cotillard is a true standout here. I love that her character isn't a simple innocent. She's smart enough not to trust Bruno right from the start. I don't like Bruno's character as much. He's a damaged person but the movie seems intent to create sympathy for him. Joaquin has a lovely vulnerability but he needs to be a tougher villain. Overall, this movie is simply too slow although it is quite beautiful.

"The Immigrant", James Gray's newest film, while retaining some of the gritty dark-crime dramatics of his previous work, feels like a radical departure. Mainly because its an Ellis Island-era period movie set 100 years ago, and because its observed through the eyes of a female protagonist and her struggle against permanent blight and the inherent depression of the situational times.

Fleeing the brutalities of Trotsky's Red Army, Polish Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and her sickly sister arrive in New York cira 1920. When her sister is quarantined and both are threatened with deportation, Ewa is taken notice and saved by the faux-sensitive brothell pimp Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) and blackmailed into prostitution. Just when Ewa may succumb to the sort of drab, bleak life that she was trying to allude, Bruno's cousin Orlando the Magician (Jeremy Renner) shows up and both men via their own quirky methods try to light a fire in the heart of the pretty foreigner.

In her best part since "Rust and Bone", Cotillard is Oscar worthy in a showy albeit poetic performance (made all the more impressive that she speaks Polish throughout most of it). Phoenix is superb as usual, as the repressed and impotent man who wants to think he's in charge. But Renner steals the show. Right when you think the movie is going to slide under the weight of the misery of its subject, his Orlando appears like a glowing gaslight of fun amongst the dim rooms and crowded corridors. Like his work in "American Hustle", its criminal that his spritely performance here will go unrewarded and under the radar.

Although the universal tale of Gray's film isn't exactly something we haven't seen before (from Kazan's bold "America, America" to Ron Howard's putrid "Far and Away") "The Immigrant" presents a rare and thoughtful experience, one in which we can learn something about the lives of long ago as well as our own.

There is nothing new or surprising in the story: a poor young immigrant girl who is fresh-off-the-boat taken advantage of, and is sexually exploited by another survivor (just one step above in the food chain ladder) in the golden age of immigration in America.

The acting is good, but the script is quite poor and the direction merely goes through the motions of formal correctness without adding depth, or a true reflection, or a new insight on the matter.

The characters lack in complexity and reality; the revealing of social injustice is more a "homework making" of a formal outrage than a truly insightful exploration of human miseries.

It is an average film with minor hits and major misses which, in my opinion, will not make its way through history, even for easy-to-please audiences as the lovers of Hollywood movies.

Separated from her ill sister and facing deportation, a Polish immigrant is taken in by a burlesque show operator who may or may not have her best intentions at heart in this drama set in 1920s New York. The film holds no bars in depicting the difficulties of immigration as our disillusioned protagonist, played by Marion Cotillard, comes to accept an existence very different to what she once imagined. Cotillard's performance is rather multi-layered: simultaneously vulnerable and ruthless (resorting to stealing what she can), and simultaneously accepting of her fate and focused on achieving more. Joaquin Phoenix is also superb as the burlesque man with a breakdown scene near the end in which he finally drops all pretenses to reveal a beating human heart. Their situation is also complicated by Cotillard encountering Phoenix's estranged cousin, played by Jeremy Renner, and a love triangle develops that never quite clicks since we are unsure until the end whether Phoenix really loves her, and as it is never clear whether Renner really loves her either or just wants to make Phoenix jealous. Certainly, an animosity exists between the two cousins that the film does not explore in as much depth as it perhaps could have. Still, what the film does do well it does very, very well. It is quite rare to find a film with such a graphic insight into the harsh actual reality of the American Dream and Cotillard's character is very much one-of-a-kind. Torn between would-be saviours and false promises, she never once gives up hope, even if her own American Dream is decidedly different by the end.