The Immigrant (2013)

The Immigrant (2013)
Directed by James Gray
Written by James Gray and Richard Manello

Set in the same time, this is not Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant in his great short subject which was more or less a contemporary story then.

In this there are two young women sisters who have come to Ellis Island from Poland. One sister is obviously ill so they are not going to let her in. The story centers around the other sister Ewa (Marion Cotillard). They are not going to let her in either, but I guy pays off the powers that be in the island and she is allowed in.

She goes into NYC with this man Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix). He is a sort of showman/pimp and puts Ewa, against her will into a tawdry burlesque show in a seedy little theater.

The movie in interesting enough with decent performances and well staged and art directed atmospheric scenes. It also shows the USA to be a lot less welcoming, even back then, contrary to what we are sometimes lead to believe.

Ultimately I’m not really sold on the pimp with a heart of gold theme of the movie which was written by two men.

I watched it on Netflix. There is the thumb up or down rating system on Netflix now. I preferred the old 5 star system because with movies like this that are OK, at least not terrible, I don’t react in such a binary way.  
So I didn’t rate this movie at all up or down in the Netflix software. It’s not really good or really terrible but somewhere floating in between.
There is a lot of stuff like that.