James Gray’s new film, The Lost City of Z, is currently showing in theaters. I thought it might be worthwhile to dust-off my review of his previous picture, 2013’s The Immigrant.
James Gray’s The Immigrant has one truly sublime moment: a performance by operatic tenor Enrico Caruso for the poor souls stuck in limbo on Ellis Island. Caruso’s voice soars and fills the space of the sparse, uninviting room in which he performs, and at once the world is stunningly, astonishingly alive with music. This moment recreates an actual historical event, finding power and mystery in the incongruity of human existence.
According to Gray, The Immigrant is an attempt to capture something of opera’s sincerity and emotional resonance (it was inspired by Puccini’s agonizingly tender Suor Angelica). If nothing else, Gray certainly succeeds in capturing opera’s earnestness. The Immigrant delivers old-fashioned melodrama with a very straight face; there’s more than a touch of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables here in its protagonist’s beatific suffering and in the film’s final, surprisingly merciful moments. If only The Immigrant had more passion.
The story centers on the seedy underbelly of New York in 1921, but the tactile reality of the period is sublimated beneath restrained, tasteful beauty. Gray’s direction is ever at a remove from the events on screen, unwilling to break from its stately manner to surprise or unsettle. The Immigrant‘s parade of prostitutes seems positively demure in the golden glow of Darius Khondji’s cinematography, and Chris Spelman’s score accentuates the proceedings with quotes from opera scores by Puccini and Wagner. But even Spelman’s score shies away from emphatic emotion. It’s as though Gray was so petrified of sensationalism that he embalmed his film instead.
Opera, after all, thrives on its expressiveness: it’s sincere, but bold and immediate, interested in the vast emotional peaks of passion and hate, love and desire. The wandering script certainly tries to find such moments, but never guides its characters in ways that make these moments reverberate. It’s evident from the film’s conclusion (which, to its credit, features one of cinema’s most magnificent shots, and one for which Khondji deserves an Oscar nomination) that what Gray hopes to achieve a sense of of spiritual awakening in the wake of unrelenting grief, but he never quite finds the path to that destination.
Perhaps, with a stronger script and a shift in Gray’s direction direction, the film’s central trio of performers (Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner) might have balanced out Gray’s reserved aesthetic approach. The script only begins to adopt its more melodramatic form about halfway through the film, as the film’s victimized, desperate protagonist, Ewa, finds herself caught between two cousins, Bruno and Emil, both of them manipulators who offer false promises of hope. It’s a dynamic that is insufficently balanced and explored.
Phoenix invests Bruno, Ewa’s manipulative pimp, with all the manic energy of his performance in The Master, but the role of Bruno actually demands for something more delicate and nuanced. His earliest scenes, where he strikes an appropriate balance of charm and menace, are the most promising, but the script unfortunately shifts Bruno from manipulator to madman. Released from his constraints, Phoenix’s energy essentially steamrolls over the character, and so when we get to the finale, which demands a great deal of precision, the character is awash in a sea of mannerisms and grunts that obscures, rather than clarifies, the character’s complexity and emotional entanglement.
As Bruno’s cousin, Emil, Renner is the film’s most charismatic presence, a charming rogue with a a career as a touring magician. For the dominant amount of his screentime, the film positions him as the kinder, more viable love interest to Phoenix’s Bruno (Renner’s introduction coincides with Caruso’s performance at Ellis Island, signalling the hope he represents). His courtship of Ewa plays out with tedious inevitability, and only in his final scene does the film effectively move past the bullet points of their relationship and reveal a dark undercurrent of sadism running beneath his boyish exterior. It’s too little, too late, though, and rather than play with that tension, the film abruptly sidelines him.
Then there’s Marion Cotillard, who, as Ewa, continually modulates between wide-eyed anguish and cold determination as Ewa suffers in hopes of freeing of her sister (who is effectively imprisoned on Ellis Island immediately after their arrival). Gray seems rarely interested in Ewa as a person beyond her tragic circumstances, with Khondji’s lens continually framing her as an unearthly icon of suffering. The film offers too few glimpses of the Ewa who existed before this tragedy, of an Ewa with different dreams and pleasures. Of all the film’s failings, this is perhaps its most unfortunate. Only in seeing Ewa as a person beyond her immediate struggle can we truly appreciate the depths of her anguish. If The Immigrant is, as Gray claims, “a verismo opera written for an actress,” it’s one that never gives its lead actress an aria.
Caves of Altamira 