James Gray’s ‘The Immigrant’

What fiction does is to suggest a large story by means of a small one. The Immigrant charts a single journey, that of two Polish sisters fleeing the poverty and unrest of post-World War I Poland. Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Magda (Angela Sarafyan) are separated almost immediately when the Ellis Island authorities detect the possibility of tuberculosis in Magda (no tests, of course, just a quick stethoscope to the chest). Magda is quarantined and slated for deportation.

Ewa is pushed ahead, but as she awaits her stamp, she’s told the address of relatives she’s provided is invalid— in fact, nonexistent. Ewa knows this isn’t so, but she’s shunted into the reject line.

In desperation, she pleads for help to a stranger who seems to know his way around. This gentleman is Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who agrees, with an air of reluctance, to see what he can do. A short while later, he escorts her out and takes her to his apartment, saying he has work for her.

Bargaining chips

The work turns out to be a burlesque routine in which Ewa is decked out as the Statue of Liberty, and Bruno is a pimp who lets out his girls to the paying customers. Ellis Island is, among other places, a recruitment site, and a few well-placed dollars ensure a reliable stream of candidates. Wan and ill-fed, Ewa is an obvious beauty, all the more desirable as a damsel in distress. She resists at first, but her need to rescue Magda trumps everything else.

What, though, of her relatives, an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn? She tracks down the address and finds them, and the sympathetic aunt seems willing to help. But Bruno lays out a little more cash and has them scared off.

Is Ewa worth all this trouble? Bruno wants her for his own, and soon finds himself agonizingly in love. The issue is complicated when an equally dubious cousin of Bruno’s (Jeremy Renner), who bills himself as Orlando the Magician, shows up and puts his moves on Ewa. Ewa responds, partly because she’s attracted to the scamp but partly as a means of getting some bargaining chips of her own. It’s a dangerous game, and it ends badly. But Bruno agrees to a redemptive act, and the sisters are reunited.

Where, though, will they go? The boat that takes them from Ellis Island is headed for a very different shore than the one they had thought to arrive at. Their only resource is that Ewa has learned what the coin of this realm is.

Primal eruption

The cinematography of the film is subdued and menacing — the only sunlight that enters it is Ewa’s fantasy of an idyllic past — but the dramatic colors are on the lurid side. This is a risky approach, and only partly successful.

Marion Cotillard as Ewa delivers a subtly shaded portrait of innocence corrupted and replaced by a survivor’s strength. But the more interesting character is Bruno, who undergoes a far more profound and unpredictable change: One sees in him, finally, as grave a damage as any he is able to inflict.

It takes the deeply studied performance of Joaquin Phoenix to make this credible. Phoenix has become, since Sean Penn retired to celebrity status, our most interesting actor. He turns the film almost inside out when he bursts into rage at Ewa’s initial rejection of him; it is such a primal eruption that it forces us to rethink who Bruno is, although we don’t understand the full significance of the outburst for his character until the act of violence that destroys him and the self-loathing that surfaces in the film’s climactic scene. Only then do we finally realize that Bruno himself is as much victim as villain, a part of the giant meat-processing apparatus that turns greenhorns into serviceable units of demand and supply and dehumanizes everyone involved.

With this insight, The Immigrant rises above its penny-dreadful plot to show us the ladder of exploitation on which America was built and on which it still largely rests. It also helps explain the individualist, winner-take-all ethos that drives it even now and accounts for so many of its social pathologies and structural defects.

If you would know the story of America, tell the story of its labor, from slave quarter to office cubicle. The Immigrant takes us to the emblematic scene of the crime.