James Gray can’t catch a break. Since the writer-director made his debut with 1994’s “Little Odessa,” each film he’s made has struggled to reach the screen. The impediments ranged from being met with the studio’s meddling interference in post-production (“The Yards”) to the main actor’s personal hi-jinks overshadowing the film during promotion (“Two Lovers”). Then there is the general indifference his films are met with in the United States, by audiences and critics alike. While a tight cinephile community continues to rightly champion the filmmaker, his work is typically ignored by those who control industry accolades.
What’s frustrating is that Gray’s films keep getting better and better while the same obstacles get in his way. “The Immigrant,” which is finally getting a proper theatrical release on May 16, screened last year at the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Festival (where I first saw it), but for unknown reasons was pushed aside for a number of months. Now, it’s being dumped into theaters right before the Hollywood Blockbuster season begins with little fanfare or promotion.
Based on the recollections of Gray’s grandparents, the film details the trials of Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard), the immigrant of the title, who, along with her sister, washes up ashore on Ellis Island in 1921, from Poland. When her sister is pulled from the crowd for showing signs of illness, and Ewa’s aunt and uncle, already in America and living in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, don’t arrive to pick her up, she falls into the hands of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who saves her from deportation. When he takes her in, she reluctantly joins his stable of girls who perform at a local burlesque show and turn tricks on the side, hoping to make enough money to spring her sister out of the hospital on Ellis Island and make a life for them in America.
Part of the appeal of Gray’s work, and also part of the reason why it’s so tepidly received, is that it falls between two modes of cinematic representation. In its tendency to be big and expressive, “The Immigrant” harkens back to a classical Hollywood style filtered through the New American Cinema visions of Scorsese, Coppola, etc. (It’s no surprise that Gray has mentioned in interviews that the film was influenced by Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Il Trittico.”) This puts him at odds with contemporary American filmmakers. But his films, unlike the work of, say, Quentin Tarantino, aren’t interested in the past as code for the present. Gray is not concerned with the past for its contemporary resonances, but as another way to navigate his own obsessions with family and small communities.
Phoenix, who was the center of Gray’s three previous films, steps into the shadows. This is a major shift for Gray, whose earlier films, while all dealing with familial relations, were also concerned with how male identity was shaped within those groups. By placing a female at the center of “The Immigrant,” we see those dynamics shift. Phoenix, an intensely physical actor (compare his broad-shouldered performance here with his turn in Spike Jonze’s “Her,” a skinny and lonely soul with a bespoke uniform to match) is balanced by Cotillard’s measured emotionality, which Gray captures in profound close-ups.
For all its harmony of expressiveness and intimacy, “The Immigrant” is a movie that escapes easy conclusions. Like all great films, it achieves nuance where other films would grasp for solid answers, which leaves it firmly out of place in the present — an unfortunate circumstance that should not be just understood but corrected.
