Even a strong performance from the estimable Marion Cotillard and a fairly good one from the always irascible Joaquin Phoenix fail to ignite the stodgy, humdrum The Immigrant. Supporting characters are uniformly stock, the story stretches plausibility, and Ellis Island seems like Alcatraz one day, a Barnum Bailey circus the next.
Jeremy Renner as a magician and nemesis to his cousin Phoenix provides a counterpart to the rest of the overtly serious characters. He tries to rescue the penniless Cotillard, a Polish refugee forced by the duplicitous Phoenix into doing burlesque and prostitution in order to save her from deportation and to garner enough money to aid her quarantined tubercular sister, who is in immigration limbo. Posing as a representative from Traveler’s Aid, Phoenix manipulates Cotillard into stripping at The Bandit’s Roost Bar. Trouble is, although Renner can do neat tricks like levitation in his stage act, he can do little to take his head out of the clouds. Then before he can whisk off Cotillard to the promiseland of California, he must deal with the rage-prone Phoenix.
Phoenix here won’t make your recall his excellent turns in The Master and Her but it is fun to watch him get angry and put his Marlon Brando on. Alternatively moody and sophomorically reflective, Phoenix justifies his exploitation of women with the wretched logic that he is saving them from a worse fate. When at one point he blurts out that he loves Cotillard, it is as if he we are suddenly in another movie. His guilt over exploiting Coltillard seems forced. When he and Renner finally duke it out, the film seems more like a vintage cartoon where the heroine shrugs her shoulders at the silliness and makes an impromptu escape while the two rivals beat each other’s heads in.
The Immigrant has skillful production values and the Oscar-winning Cotillard, who could do a TV commercial and still make me cry. Even her acting chops and considerable beauty can’t save this James Gray (check out his 2008 Two Lovers, also with Phoenix) exercise in an upside down Promised Land. Neither immigration woes nor stifled American Dreams have any business being this non-descript.