James Gray’s “The Immigrant” is a 1921 take on “Midnight Cowboy,” with Marion Cotillard as the New York naif just off the boat and Joaquin Phoenix as the greasy pimp who leads her into prostitution.
Cotillard is heartbreaking as Ewa, the Polish girl whose sister is separated from her at Ellis Island because of tuberculosis. Unable to find her only relatives in New York, and hoping to save up enough money to rescue her sister, she falls into a life of degradation orchestrated by Bruno (Phoenix), a burlesque host who runs a prostitution business on the side.
Ewa, incandescently innocent, appears onstage in the persona of Lady Liberty in a heavy-handed signal that writer-director James Gray wants us to applaud him for thinking of the Dark Side of the American Dream. She gets caught in a cycle of escape from and recapture by Bruno, who has a sentimental attachment to her that he doesn’t feel for the other call girls. The only hope is for a white knight, who gallops forth in the form of Bruno’s charming and personable cousin (Jeremy Renner), who does a cheesy magic show on the burlesque circuit.
Ewa is a representative for all of the poor and immigrant women of the time: She’s simply unable to create a path for herself, and the pudding-thick atmosphere and sickly gaslit haze conjured up by Gray enhance the sense of an existence that’s closed and stuck. Unfortunately for the movie, its story line suffers from the same fate; she’s such a passive figure that the movie is more frustrating than anything else.
True, she doesn’t have a lot of options, but it’s awfully hard to watch someone spinning her wheels for two hours. Until the final minutes, we get the sense that Ewa and Bruno could keep parting and recombining endlessly, Ewa forever suffering and Bruno forever scheming. Her goal of making it to a sunnier life in California seems much like a replay of the doomed wish for Florida in “Midnight Cowboy.”
Phoenix, who was so subtle in “Her” and brilliantly tortured in “The Master,” has lapsed back into the shouty bombast style of his “Gladiator” days, but his efforts to make the character seem layered are to little avail, especially given that Gray waits until the end to try to make him a tragic figure instead of merely a sleazy one.