The Immigrant (2013) – directed by James Gray

“The waters of the harbor were translucent and aquamarine; they ran thick with shards of ice and white islands as big as polar bears. Ellis Island lay in the distance, its Byzantine domes and blood-red roofs glowing the morning sunshine … Having passed through already, I knew the power of the Island and feared that I would be possessed. It is a lair of the deepest emotions, where hope has died and flourished, where those who love one another have been separated forever, where anything that can happen to a soul has happened, all in full view of the Battery. It is like a sinking ship just offshore, watched by those who have landed; a court of the world; a purgatory; the turning place of dreams. Once I had set foot again on Ellis Island, I knew that I had come to one of God’s places, and that those of us who had been there were tied to it forever.”
– Mark Helprin, “Ellis Island”

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Writing this review has allowed me a great privilege.  The privilege I speak of is that of attempting, with what limited persuasive powers I may possess, to introduce a very special film that most readers will not yet have seen.  After going to the trouble of seeking out a limited release film that should really be a widely released film, movie critics often find themselves under the responsibility of an imperative:  how to convince the film viewer to go out of his or her way to see something that is exceptionally above standard commercialized popcorn fare?  How to convince the viewer to make the effort to see a film when the film’s own distribution company (or, more specifically, Harvey Weinstein) has intentionally made it difficult to see the film?

This is not a duty to be taken lightly and I have struggled to decide how to begin.  I will beg the reader’s pardon if I may ask two opening questions.  First, have you ever been pleasantly taken by surprise, when watching a film, to discover that it was far more meaningful and deeper than you could have imagined?  Second, have there ever been little moments in front of the theater screen when you were suddenly convinced that you were watching something that helped you to understand, just a little more clearly, a few of the most important decisions you may make in your life?  Whenever viewers can answer these questions in the affirmative, they are referring to films that inevitably turn into classics.  The Immigrant will become one of these films.

It is my belief that James Gray is an underappreciated director who has been quietly making great films for the last two decades.  Of course, he’s only made five of them.  But that’s why every time one of his films is completed, it is an occasion to be rather excited.  That is also why it is incredibly frustrating that, in spite of the enchantments he can place upon the screen, his fifth film, The Immigrant, has only now just been given a limited release after having opened at Cannes in May of last year.  It is my further humble opinion that, decades from now when we are all dead and gone, film critics and historians may very well consider Gray to be one of the most talented American directors of our time.

And yet, today we currently reward the ephemera of directors like James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Michael Bay or Gore Verbinski with billions at the box office while virtually ignoring storytellers with imaginative sensibility like Gray.  Since April of this year, the number one top grossing film at the box office has been a comic book movie (five weeks), a brainless comedy (two weeks) a movie about a monster knocking down more buildings (one week), yet another Disney remake (one week) and a Hallmark movie about teenage lovers dying of cancer (one week).  As Gray said in one of his interviews, “Cinema has mostly become the domain of nine-year-old boys, and that’s why you see what you see.”

Being a film lover, I lend films to my friends frequently in order to (a) attempt to expose them to something new or noncommercialized, and (b) attempt to stimulate what very often will turn into jolly, lengthy, provocative and excited conversations about art, ideas and film-making.  Trying to do this is harder than it sounds.  It becomes very easy to appear either elitist or condescending, not an impression that anyone genuinely interested in sharing or persuading should give.  There may not be many things more frustrating that being shocked at how good or beautiful something is, and then realizing that almost no one else is even bothering to see or to know anything about it.  Directors like James Gray are making films that have heart and substance to them.  Heart and substance are also two primary qualities that Hollywood is currently and utterly uninterested in providing us.  Consequently, over the years, I’ve regularly asked friends if they’ve seen any of Gray’s films.  I have yet to ask this to a single one who had.

James Gray does not direct action, horror, romance or comic book blockbusters.  All of his films are reflective, sometimes melancholy, sometimes joyful, penetrating and grand studies into the family, history, nature, experience, heritage and culture of poor and lower-middle class America.  Little Odessa (1994 – with Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Maximilian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, Moira Kelly) explores the Jewish-Russian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, asking the viewer to think about how crime can threaten and tear apart close family relationships.  It does this in a way that feels very real, as if it could be happening just down the street.  The Yards (2000 – with Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, Faye Dunaway) is about a falsely-convicted man being released on parole who then tries to live honestly without getting involved in the all-consuming crime of the poorer sections of New York City.  We Own the Night (2007 – with Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Eva Mendes, Robert Duvall) is one of the most compelling films about brotherly relationships that I’ve ever seen, telling the story of how family can transcend conflicting personality, ego and self-interest.  Two Lovers (2008 – with Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini) is a meditation upon loneliness, depression, impairment of social skills and healthy vs. unhealthy romantic relationships, set in the Jewish-Russian area of Brighton Beach and loosely based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  (Gray has a Russian-Jewish background and his grandfather immigrated to American in 1923.)

In fact, these films all feel like they could have been based on classic works of literature, and merely happened to be set in modern times.  Gray has a way of making slow films that also somehow manage to have intensely personal relationships.  The tension often builds as each of his films continue.  His themes are very old and have Dickensian/Dostoevskian undertones.  I have recently been informed that “melodrama” is itself considered to be, by some critics, a “genre.”  While I have trouble with this idea, I cannot deny that the nineteenth century produced some classic stories with good, innocent and evil characters who were all genuinely and unironically good, innocent or evil.  Framing a story in such an old-fashioned manner means that moral choices will often be portrayed with startling clarity.  But clear moral choices do not have to be unbelievable, at least, not for those of us who still do believe in the existence of things like innocence, good and evil.

The scope of a classic nineteenth century story was full of human hopes and dreams, as yet undebauched by our own smug, cynical and knowingly ironic thinking.  There is something about our modern irony that makes the possibility of plain old damnation, undeserved grace, unrequited selfless love, moral calamity or unexpected redemption seem less true somehow.  As a director and a storyteller, Gray is uninterested in modern irony.  He takes what could even be described as a classical approach to cinema and outright admits that you could fairly compare The Immigrant to an opera (in particular, the “Suor Angelica” of Giacomo Puccini’s Il Trittico). Gray even argues:  “The word ‘operatic’ is often misused to mean over the top, where someone is over-emoting and that does a terrible disservice because ‘operatic’ to me means a commitment and a belief to the emotion of the moment that is sincere.”  Most of us are often are incapable of appreciating operas now, but Gray claims that they are “the last island of sincere emotion that exists in our culture.”  (If you pay attention, you will notice that Enrico Caruso shows up for a few transcendent moments in The Immigrant – a scene that is an island of sincere emotion indeed.  Also, along with the music of Puccini, listen for the music of Richard Wagner and John Taverner.)

In watching The Immigrant, while you can feel the influence of other directors of American epics, like Scorsese, Leone and Coppola, Gray’s influences go even deeper.  Besides being a fan of both Scorsese and Dostoevsky, he acknowledges an aesthetic debt to Federico Fellini’s La Strada in particular and to the Ashcan School of Painters in general (Everett Shinn, William Glackens, George Bellows, John Sloan, who all painted the daily life of poorer neighborhoods in New York City).  In another interview, Gray mentioned that his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, was also influenced by religious paintings.  Other influences he has mentioned more than once include John Cassavetes, Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. Unlike almost every other Hollywood director, Gray is interested in creating classics while also being humble about it. “You know it’s so hard to reference these people – it sounds so pretentious, like you think you’re as good as they are or whatever, but my attitude is always ‘steal from the best,’ you know?”

Thus, one of The Immigrant’s greatest strengths is in its simplicity.  There are three main characters upon whom the film relies.  Their personalities, individual stories and relationships to each other drive the film.

First, Marion Cotillard stars as Ewa, a Polish Catholic nurse who immigrates to the United States while forced to watch her sister locked away on Ellis Island for tuberculosis.  Ewa is lost and alone.  Her aunt and uncle, who should have met her on Ellis Island, have not appeared like they promised and have apparently given her a false address.  She is vulnerable and needs someone to help her.  Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, Public Enemies, Rust and Bone) is brilliant in this role and she has been suddenly establishing herself as a star who can burn up the movie screen with a single glance.  (Look for her to continue to grow into one of today’s most powerful leading ladies in Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night and as Lady Macbeth opposite Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth in 2015’s most exciting Shakespeare adaptation.)

Gray has compared Cotillard, in his estimation, to the actress Renée Jeanne Falconetti of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc.  “It’s like a silent movie actress – she doesn’t have to say anything.  There’s so much compassion for her just by the way that she is, her soul.  She radiates intelligence as well as physical beauty and, god, that’s the rarest quality.” (The Playlist.)  Those film critics who have seen the film cannot praise her enough, and I can happily agree with them:  “Marion Cotillard is now the best leading film actress in the world and she’s close to her peak in James Gray’s ‘The Immigrant.’” (David Edelstein, NPR.)  “Cotillard can say more with her expressive eyes than others can with their entire bodies, and she gives more depth to Ewa than the screenplay provides.” (Travis Hopson, DC Film Examiner.)

Second, Joaquin Phoenix plays Bruno, a nineteenth century purveyor of burlesque entertainment who also arranges for the women who work for him to be prostitutes.  It is my belief that Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in The Immigrant may eventually be considered one of the most powerful performances of his career.  To suggest this is not to make light of his Oscar caliber acting to date.  Besides in Gray’s films, his performances in Walk the Line (2005), The Master (2012) and Her(2013), among others, have proven both his versatility and his rather intense absorption into each of his different character’s beings.  (We can also look forward to another special performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming Thomas Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice.)

In this case, Phoenix’s Bruno is, when it comes down to it, a pimp.  And yet, there is little to distinguish him from many a self-indulgent 21st century man of today.  The picture that he gives us of the ways in which a man is capable of manipulating the will, the hopes and feelings of a woman is scary.  Then again, Harvey Keitel’s ‘Sport’ in Taxi Driver was also scary, whispering promises of love into a 13-year-old Jodi Foster’s ear.  But here Bruno seems even more dangerous.  His outer persona is that of a gentle and kind fellow who is only trying to help women in difficult circumstances.  “We understand.  You’re desperate.  We’ve all been desperate,” he explains to Ewa.  It is disturbingly creepy how he literally goes about convincing Ewa to prostitute herself, appealing to her moral sense and love for her family:  “I don’t want you to do this either.  But it’s not my decision.  The truth is, we both know you’re going to see this boy because for you, your sister’s well-being is more important than your own.”   Moreover, Bruno’s ability to manipulate grows more and more manifest when you think of the very language in which he frames his arguments as the tempter.  At the very point where the drugged Ewa is unlikely to respond to him, his “Tell me now if you do not want to see this boy” is tantamount to forcing her.

Then, for all his smoothness, Bruno’s fears, anxieties and paranoia are also just below the surface, and they regularly rise unexpectedly into bouts of rage where he transforms from a soft spoken man who has a way of looking down at his shoes whenever being personal, unable to make eye contact, into a violently lethal assailant.  His kindness and gentleness towards Ewa can suddenly turn into condemning her for rejecting his advances.  And then … if you think this delicate, slightly unhinged, balance can describe Bruno, you’d be wrong.  That is only his character at the beginning of the film.  While he’s this threat, the story seems to be mostly about Ewa and her response to him.  Bruno is part of the background of shame, desperation and hopelessness in which Ewa finds herself.  Part of genius of the film is how Bruno suddenly emerges from this background into a fully embodied person – and he turns out to be a person that you didn’t see coming.

Both Ewa and Bruno each have their own different and individual character arcs.  Both of them choose to do things that do not fit into how Hollywood would usually stereotype similar characters.

Finally, Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, American Hustle) plays Emil, a rather enigmatic magician who performs illusions and magic tricks at Ellis Island to entertain the immigrants.  It is interesting that Gray makes the most direct expressions of the American Dream explicit in the voice of Emil.  “Don’t give up the dream. Don’t give up the hope,” he tells the immigrants.  Emil is the one who offers Ewa a different kind of hope than Bruno.  He offers her another way of looking at her circumstances and an alternative to her vulnerable and compromising position.  There is something impulsive and happy-go-lucky about him, and, as a result, he seems much lighter and safer than Bruno.

Renner, who has already proven with The Hurt Locker’s Sergeant James that he can invest psychological depths in a character, shows less depth here than either Cotillard or Phoenix.  But, in this case, it is what the role requires.  It keeps his motivations, whims and promises mysterious.  He alternates between proving then disproving and then proving again his good intentions.  He is a performer and, in contrast to Bruno who regularly loses control of himself, Emil seems to exist behind something of a mask, always sure of himself and always in control.

There is another thought that can help frame how we think of this film.  In the West, we pride ourselves today on our “progress.”  How easy is it for us to compare ourselves with those from the past for how they viewed and treated women?  Our prejudiced ancestors, you see, viewed women as property, as objects, as things to be used, consumed and exploited.  But now women can own their own property.  Now they can vote.  They have equal rights under the law.  They can go to any university.  Today, if they want to, women can become doctors, lawyers, judges, senators, prime ministers, corporate managers, CEOs, engineers or even soldiers, auto mechanics, truckers, carpenters or electricians.  Today, their marriages are not arranged by their fathers or guardians.  They have equal rights to no-fault divorce.  They can even live socially and professionally successful lives without being married.

So aren’t we so much better than the past?

Of course, this self-satisfaction can arguably be understood as the hypocrisy that it really is.  Even a rudimentary introduction to the extent of the sex trafficking and different forms of prostitution that still exist, even in the United States, should be enough to wipe out any ideas we might have about our modern success in rightfully valuing women.  In fact, you don’t even have to look at anything currently illegal.  A brief investigation into the great power and pervasiveness of the pornography industry is also a easy summary of our contemporary views of women.  Another brief investigation into the current standards of the high fashion industry would do the same.  “Of course,” a friendly co-worker tells a scared, lonely and increasingly desperate Ewa, “you could always wait for some white knight to come along.”  In the world of Gray’s The Immigrant, “white knights” to the rescue are not to be found.  How hard are they to find today?  How many apparent “white knights” offer modern immigrant women lucrative careers in today’s pornography industry?

And yet another reason The Immigrant can be considered a gem is the nature of Ewa’s strong character.  Today’s films have often been criticized for a lack of strong female protagonists.  (Scantily clad women as comic book/superheroines do not count.  Such roles usually do not require acting or depth of character and, instead, the camera often seems most interested in showing them perform lethal gymnastics in costumes made out of leather or lingerie.)  Now, when a high quality film has actually given us a strong female protagonist in Ewa, it is being virtually ignored.  In fact, not only does this film give us a strong female character (which, although I have my own doubts about the logic of “Bechdel test,” Ewa passes it with flying colors), but it does so in a way that shows just how powerful a woman can be.  Cotillard’s Ewa is above-average beautiful in the sense that she attracts the eye of everyone around her.  But, as a character, her power does not consist in merely her appeal to the male eye.  Her ability to attract and influence comes from her own strength, integrity and determination.

Gray has been explicit about wanting to make a film with a strong female lead: “It’s embarrassing how few movies have women in the center. You know Hollywood pictures used to do it very well. Barbara Stanwyck and movies of the 1940s … starring Katherine Hepburn — female centric melodramas which oftentimes ended rather conveniently but oftentimes were excellent.”  Cotillard makes Ewa a believable center to the film.  From the light in her smile whenever she talks about her love for her sister to the slight lift of her chin in the face of what is only shame and humiliation, she carries herself like a saint.

Thus, it is the strength that inheres in Ewa’s character that makes her being pressured into prostitution so abhorrent, not just because prostitution is an evil, but because it is forcing her to be something that goes against her very being.  You see the whole gradual process through her eyes, and it is sickening.

For Ewa to use herself as an object for material gain is dehumanizing.  She sees this and, perhaps for the first time, Bruno begins to see it too (which makes one ask what he proposes to do about it).  Ewa is never confused about this. “I like money,” she tells him, “I don’t like you.  I hate you and I hate myself.”  (Watch for the dignity, if not the nobility, with which Cotillard utters these lines.)  “I know you judge me,” she says to Emil.  In another sense, there is something here there is universal about Ewa.  Being sold for sex, whether by one’s own self or by another, is utterly dehumanizing.  Any woman who is treated like an object (or who treats her own self like an object) is losing a part of herself as a person.  By treating sexuality as a commodity, sexual desire itself is twisted.  It is devaluing the person and strength of a woman and corrupting what philosopher Roger Scruton has called “the peculiar intentionality of human sexual emotion.” Scruton writes:

“Sexual desire is not a desire for sensations. It is a desire for a person: and I mean a person, not his or her body, conceived as an object in the physical world, but the person conceived as an incarnate subject, in whom the light of self-consciousness shines and who confronts me eye to eye, and I to I. True desire is also a kind of petition: it demands reciprocity, mutuality and a shared surrender. It is, therefore, compromising, and also threatening. No pursuit of a mere sensation could be compromising or threatening in this way. Those are not claims about culture, nor are they claims about the way in which desire has been rationalized, idealized or constrained by institutions. They are claims about a particular state of mind, one that only rational beings can experience, and which, nevertheless, has its roots in our embodiment as members of the human species.”

If you take the time to reflect about it even a little, this is one of the themes of The Immigrant.  Prostitution and every and any other sort of sex trafficking (including the pornography industry) denies these truths.  These “perversions” may be offered in many different forms, but their object, as Scruton argues, “is not to possess another person in a state of mutual surrender but to relieve oneself on a body, to enslave or humiliate, to treat the other as an instrument through which to achieve some sensory excitement, and so on. But in calling these things perversions we indicate a defect in the intentionality from which they spring.”  This defect of intentionality can be clearly seen by Bruno’s male customers in The Immigrant.  To them, the women in Bruno’s show are only pretty things to be used and degraded.  Gray’s having Ewa enter this situation is like seeing a light appear in the darkness.  Because Gray’s script helps you get to know her, to identify with and sympathize with her hopes and fears at losing her sister at Ellis Island, her being objectified, laughed at, jeered at and scoffed at in Bruno’s show literally feels profane.  This is then intensified by the fact that she turns out to be a devout Catholic.  There are little hints of this at first, but then you begin to hear a few of her prayers.  She clearly views what she is doing as a sin.  She hates the corruption that is around her and she is looking to immediately take the first opportunity out.  But looking for and taking such an opportunity, in the real world, is not so easy as it sounds.

Without giving away any spoilers, what I can do is summarize two further main themes, of ultimately theological import, that I believe the creators of The Immigrant had to be thinking about when they made the film.

On the Meaning of Forgiveness:

Thinking about it at only a surface level, almost no one in civilized society questions the value of forgiveness.  Yet it is another question altogether whether most of us practice forgiveness like we ought.  Hannah Arendt was a thinker whose experiences and subject matter forced her to contemplate forgiveness.  It is very interesting that she believed that being able to make promises and being able to forgive were closely related.  “Without being bound to the fulfilment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocalities.”  Given that forgiveness is one of the themes the story of The Immigrant draws your attention towards, it is then interesting that each main character in the film makes important promises.  In the film’s very first scene, Ewa makes a promise to her sister.  Bruno is full of promises and then Emil finds himself making Ewa a promise as well.

Like the ability to bind oneself to a promise’s obligation, and thus setting oneself inside the moral sphere, the act of forgiveness implies some truths about what it means to be human.  It is an act that both challenges the possibility that a human being can be completely evil (like many a villain in many a film) but also assumes the existence of evil in order to be possible.  This is where we find some of the most great-hearted heroes from our past, particularly those who have gone through enormous suffering, acknowledging the human element in evil.  Sometimes those who have suffered most at the hands of other men are also those who are most unwilling to view other human beings as the cardboard cut-out villains that we find in so many Hollywood films today. “If only it were so simple!” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human-being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I believe one of the reasons The Immigrant will only grow in our estimation is that it rejects any simplistic or one-sided views about good and evil.  Its portrayals of both good and evil are completely sincere, but sincerity does not necessarily deny complexity.  Based on this, I do not believe it to be a spoiler to say that neither Bruno nor Emil are portrayed as wholly evil or wholly good.  Both men have some good intentions.  Both men, like the rest of us, have their own selfishness to deal with.  And both of their characters ask us to question our own motivations and capacity for blindness.  When a character in the film has to learn something about “the power of forgiveness” and then to make the decision whether to practice it as an act, it is difficult to see howdeciding whether to forgive or not to forgive will not be heartbreakingly human in either case.  Arendt wrote:

“Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. This, too, was clearly recognized by Jesus … and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings no less than with his achievements, failings, and transgressions … Love, by its very nature, is unworldly …”

Indeed, there is pronouncedly something a little otherworldly about different moments in The Immigrant.  This is a story that is about the health of its characters souls.  And the longer one contemplates the idea of forgiveness, the more easily one is convinced that it is directly tied to the health of one’s own soul.  “Remember,” wrote C.S. Lewis, “we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature … In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.”

On the Confession of Sin:

Lastly, there are two scenes of confession in The Immigrant.  Both are probably the most powerful scenes in the film.

Confession of sin is a demanding act, and it is not something that is encouraged in our culture.  First, it requires assuming the very existence of sin.  Second, confession is considered by the church to be a sacrament that requires the person confessing to acknowledge personal moral failure.  This means not thinking of oneself as merely a victim of circumstances, environment or the malicious designs of other people.  Confession means assuming personal responsibility and one’s own individual autonomy within the moral universe.  It means acknowledging one’s own faults in even if the midst of the worst of circumstances.

The fact that Ewa goes to confession says something about her own strength.  She does not think of herself as a victim – in spite of the fact that the film viewer will be greatly tempted to think of her that way.  “I have many, many sins,” she confesses.  In his book, Spiritual Care, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains that “By confession we gain freedom from pride of flesh or reason. Complete self-surrender to the grace, help, and judgment of God occurs in confession. Everything is surrendered to God; we retain nothing of ourselves. Thus we become free of ourselves.” Towards the ending scenes of The Immigrant, listen for what different characters say about being “nothing.”

There is a reality about our own fallenness that is, eventually, very difficult to ignore.  The simple act of confession is therefore an acknowledgment of reality.  “We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal,” wrote Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation:

“We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!”

The scenes of confession in The Immigrant have the resonance that they do because not only are they showing the removing of masks and the admitting of truths, but because they reveal moments that could lead to either personal redemption and change, or to final damnation.  No matter what wrongs have been committed, confession is the first step to righting them and living a different life. In his Autobiography, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

“Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world … He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.”

When you arrive at the final scene in this film, ask yourself if this has happened or could have happened to anyone.

These are just a couple of the themes the makers of The Immigrant were interested in.  Be thinking about them when you see it.  And, oh yes, see it.  That the film portrays its main themes intelligently and imaginatively in a way that asks you, as the viewer, to put yourself in the shoes of the characters being faced with these decisions, gives the film a fullness and equanimity.  That Cotillard (quickly wiping away her tears and assuming an attitude of dignity) and Phoenix (whispering temptations and damnations alternatively) also turn in the acting performances that they do makes the film even more rare.  It may be a dark and brooding sort of film, but the nightingale always sings sweetest at the darkest hour.

When films like this appear, and when films like this are treated to shoddy, half-hearted releases by distribution companies that try to pressure directors into making their films less contemplative, well … now is the time for all good critics & viewers to come to the aid of James Gray.

References:

– Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. pgs. 237, 241-242
– Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Spiritual Care. Translated by Jay C. Rochelle, 1985. pg. 63.
– Chesterton, G.K. Autobiography. 1937. pgs. 329-330.
– Giroux, Jack. “Moviepilot Interview: James Gray Discusses ‘The Immigrant.’ Moviepilot. May 22, 2014.
– Kiang, Jessica. “Cannes Review: James Gray’s Careful, Poised ‘The Immigrant’ Builds Slowly To A Resonant Climax.” The Playlist. May 24, 2013.
– Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. 1952. pg. 107.
– Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. 1961. pg. 32.
– Newman, Nick. “James Gray Talks ‘The Immigrant’ Influences, New York, Cinematography, Cutting Trailers & More.” The Film Stage. May 13, 2014.
– Ng, David. “‘The Immigrant’: James Gray on Puccini and other opera influences.” Culture Monster. March 12, 2014.
– Perez, Rodrigo. “NYFF: James Gray Talks Writing For Marion Cotillard & The Cinematic Influences Of ‘The Immigrant.’” The Playlist. October 3, 2013.
– Scruton, Roger. A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism. 2006. pg. 91.
– Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago. 1974. pg. 168.