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"Golden Door" movie review |
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Written by Jack Mathews, MCT
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Tuesday, 05 June 2007 |
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GOLDEN DOOR
2 stars
With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato. Director: Emanuele Crialese. Running time: 1:58. PG-13: Nudity. In Italian and English with subtitles.
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Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese's dramatically static "Golden Door" is titled "Nuovomondo" ("New World") in his own country, and that's what it should be here.
"Golden Door," taken from the Emma Lazarus poem etched on bronze at the Statue of Liberty, refers to Ellis Island, the final destination point of this tale of Sicilian immigrants making their way to America in the early 20th century. But the movie is mostly about the fantasized new world they think awaits them.
Through repeated images of immigrants swimming in milk, lying under trees that shed coins, and carrying away bounties of gigantic fruits and vegetables, Crialese suggests the disappointments that are actually ahead for his peasant characters.
The exception among the central characters is Charlotte Gainsbourg's Lucy Reed, a proper British woman stranded in the coastal Sicilian town where migrating Italians are boarding a ship bound for the U.S. We never learn why Lucy is alone, only that she needs to find a husband en route and be ready to accept a proposal from him at Ellis Island.
Otherwise, she'll be sent back on the same ship with other single women and men, and women and children who fail intelligence tests meant to separate mental defectives from the throngs being processed for admittance.
Much of this detail is illuminating and for the immigrants trying to clear the last hurdle, the stakes are indeed high. Still, the movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious.
The real star of the film is Vincenzo Amato's Salvatore Mancuso, a widowed farmer who sells his animals for clothing and enough money to buy steerage aboard the New York-bound ship for his two sons and his reluctant mother.
Salvatore is the dreamer and it's through his imagination that we glimpse the land of milk and plenty. It is also Salvatore who agrees to marry Lucy when they get to Ellis Island.
Whether this marriage of convenience will simply lead to another disappointment for Salvatore, or mark the beginning of his pursuit of the American Dream, we'll have to wait for the sequel.
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