THE IMMIGRANT DEALS WITH ELLIS ISLAND GRAFT IN 1921
Ewa Cybulska (played by Marion Cotillard) and her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyn) hope to make a new life together in America after their parents are killed in Poland during World War I. They take a boat to New York, disembark at Ellis Island, and are in a queue to be cleared for entry amid the chaos of thousands. But when Magda coughs, she is quarantined for possible tuberculosis, and the home address of their relatives is said to be phony, so Ewa is routed to a deportation hearing because, with nowhere to live, she is likely to be a “public charge.” In addition, there are rumors that she has low morals (sex for money on board the ship). In enters Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix), who spots Ewa’s beautiful face, and soon a payment under the table gets her released to live in an apartment that later she discovers to be a house for prostitutes. Ewa is at first unaware of what she has been trapped into, but she is desperate to get her sister released for entry. Later, she finds that the address was correct, and her relatives report that they were also falsely told that the two sisters were not on board that ship or on Ellis Island. An apparent inconsistency in the plot is that the rumor about her ship conduct also reaches her relatives; on that basis, which she denies, her relative’s husband will not allow Ewa to take up residence with them. Almost up to the end a noir film, directed by James Gray, The Immigrant shows how corruption in that era was able to play a role in human terms, isomorphic about what is going on today amid millions of “illegals.” MH
THE RETRIEVAL MAKES UP A STRANGE STORY
Without titles or voiceovers, the plot of The Retrieval is difficult to discern because the actors, who have good diction in person, mumble their lines almost incoherently on screen. The best way to figure out the plot is to attend a screening followed by a Question-and-Answer session with writer-director Chris Eska, who professes interest in what happened to former slaves between the day when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect (1/1/1963) and the end of the Civil War. Claiming that there is no documentation on the subject, he makes up a plot in which a few slaves have escaped from their captivity and are wandering about in 1864, trying to stay alive amid occasional eruption of combat. Southerners, trying to round them up, recruit teenage slave Will (played by Ashton Sanders) to help them find at least one particular escapee. But most Blacks remained on the plantations, where they retained food and shelter, and the film does not answer why some became renegades. MH