The Immigrant

[WhizzerMarvin TrinaJasonMendel]

I saw The Immigrant this morning and floored by the performances, script, direction and the attention to detail with the technical aspects. It unseated Grand Budapest as my favorite movie so far this year, and Marion Cotillard is just devastating in the title role.

Cotillard speaks using a Polish accent, and about half of her dialogue is in Polish too. The performance is wonderfully restrained; she barely speaks above a whisper for a good deal of the film.

Joaquin Phoenix continues to amaze me as well. To give us The Master, Her and now this in succession is too much for me. Slight SPOILER*** My audience was so startled during his first big outburst. There was an unease with his character up until that point, but it caught me (and seemingly everyone else!) so off guard.

I liked that the script offered up some surprises and I never knew exactly what was going to happen next. People behaved believably, but not at the expense of dramatic tension. The trailer scared me because, given the somewhat thin plot, the pacing could have been deathly slow, but things moved along nicely. It is depressing subject matter, but Gray knows not to make it too unrelenting.

I can't recommend this enough.

[Mr Roxy]

Just shows critics do not know **** from shinola about things

Some early review I read thought it was a big bore. Some also did not like The Railway Man which was great.

[WhizzerMarvin TrinaJasonMendel]

Actually most of the critics have given it very good reviews.

[FindingNamo]

No. You're wrong. Roxy saw some review somewhere, therefore critics can't tell the difference between shinola and the kind of stuff Roxy spews everyday.


An actual look at what the top critics said

[Jordan Catalano]

Namo, that's certified fresh at an 82%. Obviously the critics are talking out of their asses and have no idea what they're saying. And when Roxy responds to you, he'll let you know that you're a total (_o_) even though he doesn't know you posted.

[FindingNamo]

At least he's consistent?

[strummergirl]

I loooooooooove James Gray movies. So much film classicism, so much throwback, so much cinema. He almost feels rebellious and radical for how insistent he is on seeking inspiration from Elia Kazan, Luchino Visconti, Josef von Sternberg and even B-side Charlie Chaplin (this film, originally called Lowlife, shares its name with the relatively obscure 1917 Chaplin short that share quite a lot of composition). We Own The Night and Two Lovers are great but there was something about this that also floored me.

I am so angered in how mishandled this film has been by the Weinstein Company. I cannot believe after picking it up at Cannes that it disappeared until the NYFF, where he has some support if you notice a lot of the reviews for him are NY-based (and yet his most fanatical critical backing comes from France where you can already order the BluRay), along with smaller ones and now it is coming out. I just don't get with such meh films on The Weinstein Company's 2013 slate that Harvey didn't even try with either this or Fruitvale Station. Both films are flawed and neither is going for box office coin, but both had enough critical support more so than The Butler, August: Osage County, or Philomena. I'd take Cotillard over all the Best Actress nominees, including Blanchett.

This is Cotillard's best performance- with a perfected Polish accent to boot, Joaquin Phoenix in a tough role to play and to really consider deep on first glance but much more impressive than in Her (but he is always reliable as a Gray lead), and Jeremy Renner while ultimately is a bit of a device in furthering tensions to have that third act happen has scenes of literal magic. You can also see how the Phoenix and Cotillard characters both could see him from their perspectives.

Darius Khondji's cinematography needs to get consideration, at least. It is very much like Gordon Willis' old New York scenes in The Godfather Part II. That last shot, much like the final shot in 12 Years a Slave, was when after holding it together up until that last shot was when the emotions poured out of me.

This is Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's review of it on The AV Club.
http://www.avclub.com/review/james-grays-immigrant-american-masterpiece-204576

[WhizzerMarvin TrinaJasonMendel]

This was my first James Gray movie, but if his other films are at this level I'll gladly check them out.

I loved the kind of sepia wash that really made it feel like you were watching an older film. That final shot was masterful, but so was the sequence in the hallway with three leads.

Do you think there will be any chance that this gets remembered during award season? Cotillard is Oscar nomination worthy, no matter what competition may come her way in the fall and winter.

[strummergirl]

The issue is the Weinstein game is largely musical chairs. Harvey at Cannes just a couple of days ago rolled what people expect to be his awards slate films: Tim Burton's Big Eyes (very bait-y biopic on Margaret Mead and her abusive husband played by Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz), that Alan Turing biopic that already sounds exhausting with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role, a film called Suite Francaise with Michelle Williams as a woman in an occupied country during WWII falling in love with a Nazi soldier and those jokes just write themselves, AND another Macbeth adaptation with Fassbender as Macbeth and Cotillard as Lady Macbeth. I think Harvey's priorities are for him to figure out who to push in first as both a film and in actress, with Macbeth and Big Eyes probably fighting for both those slots. I think The Immigrant is just a distant memory for Harvey. A festival buy that he never bothered to use correctly.

I can expect Cotillard to bring the goods in Macbeth but I can also see her getting more critical support from NYFCC more for The Immigrant. It's that type of performance in that type of film where they love to reward the actresses be it Rachel Weisz in The Deep Blue Sea or Sally Hawkins in Happy-go-Lucky or that crazy time when Hope Davis won it for 2 films when Charlize Theron was sweeping for Monster.

Heck, this is so the American film that winds up in the Cahiers du Cinema Top 10. Two Lovers did it before.

Whizzer- I recommend Two Lovers- which got lost thanks to Joaquin's infamous prank persona for I'm Still Here. It is the most spiritually like The Immigrant in terms of being this washed-out New York based melodrama laying on the Chekhov. We Own The Night and also The Yards (albeit that one got compromised thanks to Harvey Scissorhands who changed the ending) are also great, which also feature strong Mark Wahlberg performances in case you were wondering why he seems to have a comfort zone playing either cops or criminals.

[tazber]

I recommend The Yards and We Own the Night.

Two Lovers left me indifferent.

Looking forward to seeing this one though.

[Roscoe]

The trailer wasn't promising, it looked like just another Period Misery Piece, but the high quality of the reviews and the presence of the sublime Marion Cotillard make me more interested than I had been.

[HorseTears]

Sounds fantastic. Thanks for the recommendation, Whizzer!

[strummergirl]

"The trailer wasn't promising, it looked like just another Period Misery Piece"

This is what I was saying about how TWC totally does not know how to push this movie. Even the posters remove the sepia tones and textures that added so much to the film's aesthetic. And watching the trailer after I saw the film, I was aghast on what film Harvey supposedly saw and what he thinks the public wants. For a guy who used to say the reason he entered the business is being so taken by the storytelling in Russian novels as a teenager, you would think Weinstein and a director like James Gray, whose films definitely owe to such storytellings, would be kindred spirits of a sort. Nope.