The Immigrant

In the opening shot of James Gray’s The Immigrant, the camera pulls slowly back from the soft focus Statue of Liberty. We assume it’s the perspective of the immigrants approaching Ellis Island in 1921. But as they approach it we withdraw. The ensuing melodrama takes a critical view of that emblem of America and its open-hearted promises to the huddled masses who seek her refuge. 

The two orphan sisters who flee to America find nothing like the land of welcome and opportunity. Magda is sidelined with disease, set for deportation.  Eva is so committed to save her that she drifts into prostitution and abetting a murderer. 

If the film feels like another Perils of Pauline — and, alas, it does — that coheres with its period setting and the dramas and early films of its time. But I suspect writer/director Gray has more serious fish to fry. His immigrant’s tribulations develop our sympathy perhaps with the purpose of making us more understanding and supportive of today’s problem refugees. 

It’s easier to present a contemporary lesson if it’s set in another time and place. Then we don’t feel hectored, our guard drops, and we might — just might — find ourselves feeling differently about the issue in our time. Perhaps even a little more humane. 
     Change the Poles to Mexicans and the other elements stay constant: the confusing, arbitrary and inflexible bureaucracy, the corruption and bribery that permeate the system, the seductive parasites that play the margins to exploit the helpless, the general climate of bigotry that betrays the promise of freedom and equality. When the cops beat up and rob “the kike” the only justice is the poetic done the guy who has greased his way through. The strippers’ show purports to celebrate the world but it’s all a tease. And Eva’s romantic rescuer is an illusion as much as an illusionist.

This kind of surface distancing is what Shelley had in mind when he declared the poets (that is, fiction writers) to be “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.” A period tear-jerker like this just might stir up enough humanity to soften the Republicans’ resistance to immigration reform. Especially when the package is ribboned with Eva’s family values and her determination to make her own way, by whatever means, and eventually to save her soul. 

     In the last shot the two sisters are rowed away from Ellis Island, to seek their future in the nonstop heat of California, while the vile seducer/pimp Bruno Weiss is boxed in helpless to escape his personal Ellis Island, the no-man’s land of a profound sinner who can’t believe in his own one act of generous humanity and grace. Eva learns forgiveness but he is too embittered to feel forgiven. But then he was outside Eva’s confession booth, outside any system of faith and consolation because he’s trying to make it only as the amoral capitalist.