Awash in Good Intentions

 

The immigrant experience, past and present, is a subject of endless fascination for filmmakers. Last year’s “The Namesakeâ€� and the documentary “Rain in a Dry Landâ€� come to mind as recent movies in this genre. They shine a light on the miscommunications and miseries that arise from the inevitable culture shock of leaving home and coming to a new land.

  Few movies have captured the immigrant experience as viscerally as “Golden Door,â€� the story of a family from the Sicilian countryside that makes the journey to America at the turn of the 20th century.  (The words “Golden Doorâ€� are from the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty; the film’s Italian title is “Nuovomondo,â€� new world.)

   Cinematically, this movie is a masterpiece.  There are wordless scenes with continuous tracking shots that take your breath away.  In one, we see from above a crowded steamship, full of hopeful emigrants, as it slowly leaves port, opening a wider and wider chasm between the spectators on shore and the travelers on the ship: a visual metaphor for Old and New worlds, past and present, loss and hope.  When the ship’s foghorn blasts, every expectant face turns upward toward the sound — and the camera — creating a moment that seems frozen for eternity.

   In another, the passengers are tossed about their cramped sleeping quarters like ragdolls when waves, unseen, roil the ship.

   Hours later, the crew enters to find a sea of bodies laid out on the floor, some alive and some not. This may be the most claustrophobia-inducing movie since “Das Boot.â€�

   In the opening scene, Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) and his son Angelo (Francesco Casisa) are climbing to the top of a cliff in the moonlike landscape of Petralia, their home village in the Sicilian mountains, to pray to a cross for guidance on whether to leave for America.  In the final scene, they and other immigrants are shown, dreamlike, swimming in a river of milk.

   Unfortunately, this last image is also a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with this movie. This is a film that gets washed away in a river of its own good intentions and artistic aspirations.  It comes off more as a series of sensational pictures than a well thought-out whole. The story is thin and lacks the strength to support an emotional hook. Bits of magical realism are substituted for character development.

   The plot, such as it is, involves Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a refined but fallen Englishwoman who is somehow stranded in Italy and must find a family to travel with and a man to marry her (Salvatore, naturally) post haste in order to gain admittance into America.  It’s hard to see what Gainsbourg is doing in this film, other than showing off her multilingual fluency and lambasting the American bureaucrats at Ellis Island who administer IQ tests to the immigrants to determine their “fitness.â€�

   More compelling are the intertwined fates of the family matriarch, Fortunata (the wonderful Aurora Quattrocchi), and Pietro (Filippo Pucillo), Salvatore’s younger, deaf-mute son.

   Two young women, Rita and Rosa (Federica de Cola and Isobella Ragonese) also come along for the ride but don’t have much to do until the penultimate scene in which the immigrant women get pawned off as brides to anyone who will claim them.

   In a footnote worth mentioning, the unmistakable Brooklyn-born character actor Vincent Schiavelli (best known, perhaps, as the “subway ghostâ€� in “Ghostâ€�) has a small role, his last; he died during the filming of this movie in his beloved Sicily.

   

“Golden Doorâ€� is rated PG-13 for brief, graphic nudity.  It is mostly in Italian with English subtitles.

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