The Immigrant isn’t just a period piece about the trials and tribulations many impoverished travelers faced when they came to this country looking for a new life after the first World War. It’s also a look at the trials and tribulations that women who fall on hard times have faced after catching the eyes of predatory men, all throughout history. The lead character is a Polish immigrant named Ewa (Marion Cotillard), who after an unseemly incident on the boat ride over to America, and because of the lung illness of her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), has been denied entry into the country. Eventually she’s faced with a decision—either go back to the life she has risked so much to flee, or accept the help of a suspicious man named Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who seems to have all the right connections, and has offered to get her off of Ellis Island and into the country proper.
Turns out, like many men who offer to help out strangers while simultaneously sporting a creepy leer, Bruno is a pimp and a con artist, and it isn’t long after Ewa comes to rely on him for her continued existence that he forces her into a life of prostitution. From this point on, the story goes from sad to sadder, until Ewa also catches the eye of a charismatic young magician (Jeremy Renner) who performs at the same speakeasy where Bruno runs a topless stage show. Then there’s a fight for her fate that injects some much-needed hope into her life, but that still winds up being vile and depressing, because it’s never a good thing when two men fight over the fate of a woman who has no say in her own matters. The Immigrant is a difficult, dark story about the lack of female agency in our culture. It seems like a work that should be an eye-opening look back at a worse time in our history, but, unfortunately, it couldn’t be any more relevant to today’s news cycle—which is the main thing that makes it interesting.
Or, at least, it’s what adds some interest to the proceedings. To call this movie interesting is giving it a bit too much credit, because it can often be a bore. The story is rote and predictable. From the very first scene where we’re introduced to a couple of wide-eyed, innocent young women who are in no position to have any power and a squinty-eyed, opportunist man who’s in a position to pull all of the strings, you know exactly where things are heading and the steps they’re going to take to get there. The introduction of Renner’s character throws a monkey wrench into the proceedings, but it comes so late in the film that part of you has already checked out, and it also adds elements of silly melodrama to what had been a film that dealt with serious subject matter up to that point. Plus, Renner, for some reason, sticks out like a sore thumb in a presentation where everything else feels period-appropriate, and that can be distracting. You’re completely submersed in 1920s New York for the first half of the film, and then suddenly a big Hollywood movie star pops up out of nowhere doing a soft shoe. Jarring.
In addition to that, Cotillard isn’t as consistent as she could have been in the lead role. She’s not bad in this movie, really—she’s so precious and she projects so much vulnerability that she forces you to empathize with her character—but her portrayal of Ewa occasionally becomes a borderline caricature of the downtrodden, foreign other. In one scene she will have the resolve and determination to take control of her own fate, and in the next she’s all wide-eyed pleading and a clutching of the ratty shawl that’s stretched across her shoulders. In her better moments you see flashes of the strong performer who turned heads in La Vie en Rose and Rust and Bone, but in those scenes where she becomes a helpless victim to the developing plot, she resembles a sort of ridiculous cross between Minnie Mouse and Borat.
The one element of this film that’s consistent and strong all the way through is Phoenix’s performance as Bruno. He’s playing a complex character who’s always putting on a performance, and is always holding his true feelings back from the audience (until he isn’t), and it’s just phenomenal how much nuance he’s able to bring to the role. Even when Bruno appears to us as a nice guy in the opening of the film, Phoenix is somehow able to project menace from behind his eyes without overtly showing his cards. When Bruno’s on stage directing his burlesque show, Phoenix is able to show how easily he slips into a role of bravado, phoniness, and charm. When Bruno flies off the handle and gets violent, Phoenix is able to viscerally convey just how completely blinded by his own rage and insecurities the character is, and he goes to such a despicable place that he makes him appear to be completely irredeemable. Except that, with the dropping of the performer aspect of his character and the addition of a few layers of real sentiment in the third act, eventually he makes you at least understand Bruno, if not empathize with him. The Immigrant takes you on a real journey, just through your experiences observing this one character.
Which is the strongest argument it makes regarding whether or not it’s worth your time. The advertising for this film made it look much more simple than it actually is. It sold the story of an evil man and a righteous man battling for the fate of a downtrodden woman. In actuality, that’s not what it ends up being at all though, at least on a character level. The woman is downtrodden and at the mercy of those around her, to be sure and to an unsettling point, but the two men battling each other over her fate don’t end up being so cut-and-dried. Phoenix’s character isn’t so generically evil, and Renner’s is anything but righteous. The Immigrant develops its male characters fully, and turns them into three-dimensional creations who are painted in shades of grey. Even if it doesn’t allow its female protagonist any say when it comes to her own future, it at least has the good sense to know that any male character who’s doing the same can’t be a protagonist who we will root for. In that respect, it effectively gets its message across.
Still though, even with all of that welcome moral complexity, it doesn’t escape the problem where whole stretches of its runtime alternately go from being boring to being ridiculous, and that’s a problem serious enough to sink any movie’s chances of being worth recommending.
