Joaquin Phoenix and Jon Hamm take advantage of unsuspecting foreigners in a pair of movies, The Immigrant and Million Dollar Arm , opening this week.
Jon Hamm in Million Dollar Arm.
Disney Enterprises
You can make a double feature about the commodification of unsuspecting foreigners this weekend, if you're living in one of the cities in which The Immigrant opens in limited release. Alongside Disney's Million Dollar Arm, which opens wider, the movie makes for a decent treatise on the mirage-like qualities of the American dream. They're both stories of people who come to the U.S. and are immediately exploited by unscrupulous Americans (who eventually feel bad about being such brutal capitalist beasts). They're very different movies that represent an unease with the myth of the country as a land of boundless and universal opportunity — but only one of them does this in the form of a feel-good sports underdog story.
That's not The Immigrant, the latest feature from James Gray (Two Lovers, We Own the Night), an American director who continues to be more famous in France, perhaps the film equivalent of being a musician who's big in Japan. A somber, gut-wrenching period drama set in 1921 New York, The Immigrant is the kind of movie that's usually saved for awards season, and features a pair of excellent performances that will unfortunately probably be forgotten by the beginning of the Oscar race. It's centered on a luminous Marion Cotillard as Ewa Cybulski, a Polish woman who arrives via Ellis Island. When her sister Magda is quarantined due to tuberculosis, and the uncle they were supposed to meet doesn't show, Ewa finds herself depending on the support of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), a slippery entrepreneur who owns a disreputable theater/brothel, and who comes a little too readily to her side.
Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix in The Immigrant.
Anne Joyce, Wild Bunch/Weinstein Company
Ewa's an innocent, but she not a fool, and she's justifiably wary of what strings will turn out to be attached to Bruno's offers to give her a place to stay and help her reunite with her sister. But Ewa is stranded without options in a bustling but unforgiving city, and her ability to fight back fades as all other choices are taken from her. Bruno is exactly what she fears, but he's also more than that — an exploiter and a sentimentalist, capable of falling in love with Ewa while simultaneously serving as her pimp, leading her down a path of degradation and desperation. And when Jeremy Renner surfaces as Orlando, a magician who performs for the detainees on Ellis Island and who has a history with Bruno, he carries a promise of romance and rescue that also turns out to be more complicated than it first appears.
James Gray is Joaquin Phoenix's most frequent director, and the two have crafted a character of remarkable complexity in Bruno, who's despicable and tragic, pitiful and awful. The extent of his ruthlessness takes a while to become clear, but he's also capable of defensiveness that comes from a place of apparent emotional (if not justified) sincerity. "I don't want you to do this either," he says tenderly to Ewa as he's about to sell her into her first act of prostitution. "It's not my decision." He's a savvy user of the vulnerable and defenseless, but understands more than anyone the promise that's drawn them and everyone to the country. When he's parading his girls down by a Central Park underpass, he describes them as the fallen daughters of New York aristocracy, knowing that everyone loves the idea of high-end things being so easily within their grasp.
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