Review: The Immigrant

City Paper grade: B+

Although the Weinstein Company’s release plan is more reminiscent of clandestine border crossings than entering through Ellis Island, James Gray’s evocative period piece follows Marion Cotillard’s wayward Pole through the golden door and onto the mean streets of Manhattan. She quickly falls prey to Joaquin Phoenix’s mercurial wheeler-dealer, who treats her like an object of affection one moment and a piece of property the next. Gray doesn’t spare the portentous symbolism (see the prostitute garbed as Lady Liberty for proof), but he’s working in an old-fashioned idiom that supports it. The film’s classicism can be stifling — it has a touch of the self-willed masterpiece about it — but it falls away when Jeremy Renner comes on the scene as a stage magician whose dedication to sleight of hand makes him paradoxically honest. The movie’s centerpiece, a pageant for quarantined deportees at Ellis Island, is a tragic encapsulation of the American Dream in all its chimerical promise, part aspiration, part lie — and one of the most thrilling sequences in recent memory.