The Distancer: Tuesday, May 12, 2020
DAY 61: The Immigrant
Welcome to the new and improved The Distancer! The same content you love (or tolerate) in a newer, sleeker format.
Some new features:
Self-subscribe: It’s been amazing to see the response to this newsletter and how many people have passed it along to friends who in turn want to subscribe. It’s been pretty old school with people sending emails with their friends’ addresses and me manually adding them into Google Contacts. While I’m still happy to take care of this myself, people can now sign themselves up either by visiting the site (thedistancer.substack.com) or by using the “subscribe now” button at the bottom of each post. I’ll also throw one here for good measure…
Buttons and hyperlinks: I assume this is fairly intuitive, but it’s worth repeating just in case! I’ll be moving most of the links that I’ve been pasting as plain text into hyperlinks (which will usually be bold and in blue) and as buttons. Apologies if you feel condescended to by me having to explain this.
Centralized archive: I had hoped to have this complete by the time of launch, but in the very near future, every post I’ve sent out will be located here. So now even the newest of subscribers will be equipped the next time someone asks, “Oh really, you love The Distancer? Name five of their albums.”
Past recommendations are now in the email footer: Click the button and you’ll see the full list on the service Letterboxd. It’s no longer situated directly above that day’s recommendation.
Unsubscribe: I get it, some of you might have not realized what you signed up for. There will be an unsubscribe button at the bottom of every email now, if you decide you no longer want to receive this. (Shoutout to the one rando who emailed me and asked to be taken off my list back in March.)
Some things you can still do:
Reply to me! It’s not particularly intuitive, but if you reply to this message from your email browser of choice, I will receive it. Thanks to so many of you who reach out when you’ve said I turned you onto a new favorite or mentioned a movie you loved.
Share, donate and watch the movies like you were doing before. Or like you weren’t before, makes no difference to me. But it’d be a lot cooler if you did.
Now that I’ve got that all taken care of, onwards…
A little something fun to start off: GQ published their first cover profile that was conducted all remotely, and it was a great one of the wonderfully weird Robert Pattinson. Worth a read if for no other reason than for the description of him making a bizarre pasta concoction and needing a reminder from the journalist that you can’t put foil in a microwave. (Big Jennifer Lawrence “don’t put metal in the science oven” in American Hustle energy.)
Perhaps I’m exposing my own naïveté here, but prior to the pandemic, I can’t say I knew much about what “mutual aid” was … and now I hear the term almost daily. If you, like myself, could use more background, the great Jia Tolentino has a most helpful and informative explainer over at The New Yorker.
If you feel so compelled as to jump in and contribute, here’s a pretty nifty spreadsheet with a number of mutual aid funds for any number of areas, types of worker and more.
A quick programming note…
The Cannes Film Festival was supposed to kick off today, which is a huge bummer for cinephiles everywhere (even as it ranks on the low end of COVID-19 fatalities) as it marks a major kickoff to the year in global cinema. I was fortunate enough to attend it twice in college, and it was a formative experience that saw the beginning of many cinematic obsessions and lifelong friendships. I miss it dearly at this time of year, a phenomenon doubtlessly exacerbated by the tyranny of the Facebook “On this Day” feature. With all due respect to my friends and colleagues in advertising, the most important award handed out in Cannes during the summer will forever be the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.
Since no one will be enjoying Cannes in-person this year, I figured now was a great time to curate a miniature Cannes full of titles from past festivals that are now available at home! So, for the originally intended duration of the festival (May 12-23), I’ll be recommending one former Cannes title per day that I think is worth watching now. And I’ll try to sneak in some fun factoids, trivia or other nuggets of information that I think are worth sharing, too.
CANNES FACT #1: It’s pronounced “Can,” not “Con.”
DAY 61: The Immigrant (available for free on TUBI - no subscription/profile required)
The Immigrant is more than just my favorite movie that I saw in my two trips to Cannes — I think it’s the best movie of the last decade altogether. Part of that likely stems from the idyllic circumstances under which I first saw it at the festival, an early-morning screening before any of the official reviews hit. When the credits rolled, I felt I had just seen a masterpiece, and because this was 2013 and I didn’t have a cell data plan, I had no idea what anyone else thought until I connected to WiFi later in the day. The movie was just my little secret, this consummate moviegoing experience defined solely on my own terms. Now, it’s morphed into my critical cause célèbre.
Despite what you might infer from the title, The Immigrant is not some kind of political polemic on a hot-button issue. Though set in the 1920s, it feels almost removed from time altogether, as if it could happen any period in American history but also needed to occur where it does. The way co-writer/director James Gray tunes into timeless frequencies of human struggle and spiritual anguish makes the film feel akin to something like an opera. That’s largely stemming from his decision to root the film in unabashed emotionality and reject ironic distance altogether. We are not above these characters because we are these characters, all tied together in this collective journey of finding ourselves and our place in our country’s great experiment of adoption and belonging.
The film opens with the great beacon of American hope, the Statue of Liberty, and then takes us inside Ellis Island (the first time the actual location had ever been used for a movie!) to meet Marion Cotillard’s Ewa Cybulska, a Polish immigrant fleeing her homeland after the terrors of The Great War. With her sister immediately quarantined at the border and American relatives unwilling to shelter her, Ewa falls in with Joaquin Phoenix’s shady Bruno Weiss. He has the connections to help her reunite with her sister — or so he claims — but his help does not come without a cost to her dignity and pride.
Though this seems like a power dynamic that portends a damsel-in-distress/villain dichotomy, The Immigrant is far from simple. Both Ewa and Bruno are capable of cruelty and kindness, hope and desperation. In the hands of two of the finest actors of their generation, these characters’ clawing for respect and inclusion cuts to the soul. Cotillard has the kind of wide, expressive face that recalls the emotiveness of early silent film actors; a confessional scene where Gray shoots her in isolated close-up against a black background rings out like a primal plea for mercy with an almost unbearable power.
Meanwhile, Phoenix’s anger has never been so finely channeled as it is here. It’s more than just a ball of uncontrolled rage — he’s reflective and brooding, too. When he lashes out, he does so in a way that lets you see the deep scar tissue spurring the behavior of this wounded animal. One of the most stunning things about The Immigrant is that Bruno is not really the antagonist of the film; he’s a co-protagonist along with Ewa in his own right. It’s a daring narrative maneuver that the film effortlessly pulls off as it nears its close, and Gray solidifies the film as one about their inextricably linked journey towards salvation with a closing shot for the ages. (Like that meme from last year, but dead serious, this shot is brilliant and should be shown in any film study class.)
If you want more plot specifics, check out my review of the film from when it opened in theaters a year later. (Gray got in the crosshairs of producer Harvey Weinstein, who wanted to slap a ridiculously phony ending on The Immigrant and retaliated by burying it upon release — yet another reason why I’ve taken it upon myself to become such a vocal evangelist.) But as I can attest with my own experience, the best way to experience the film is with as little knowledge as possible. Arrive open to feel deeply, sometimes painfully, and let the film carry you to higher ground with its beauty, empathy and compassion for all who strive to achieve the American Dream.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall