Even in its post-Weinstein form, the Miramax marketing machine has an knack for choking the life out of perfectly respectable foreign films. One look at the insipid poster for Emanuele Crialese's Italian-immigrant drama Golden Door, with its "Martin Scorsese Presents" seal of mainstream palatability and the unpersuasive promise of "A Romance That Would Change Their Lives Forever," should send skeptical moviegoers running for the hills. That said, the actual film compellingly sidesteps cliché. Despite the tactile imagery of cinematographer Agnes Godard (on loan from French visionary Claire Denis), there is nothing "sumptuous" or "swooning" about Golden Door. In Crialese's terms, the immigration process is relentless drudgery — punctuated every so often by hopeful superstition and New-World fantasy — and no amount of movie magic can will that drudgery away.
A Sicilian widower (Vincezo Amato), his mother and two sons board a steamship bound for Ellis Island in search of la dolce vita. On board, the widower meets an alluring, enigmatic Englishwoman (Charlotte Gainsbourg). She asks to marry him to guarantee her safe passage, and they form an alliance of both romance and practicality.
Golden Door is a tad overlong and mostly short on historical revelation, but Crialese peppers it with unexpected phantasmagorical flourishes. Even with thousands of travelers gathered on deck and a crowd on the dock, the steamship pulls away from Sicily in complete, unbroken tranquility, save for a series of horrifying guttural emissions from the bowels of the vessel. The ship arrives at Ellis Island completely shrouded in fog, and in fact, the film never offers an exterior glimpse of the New World. Instead, we experience Ellis Island as a series of endless formalities, from mass betrothals to lice checks to intelligence tests. As Golden Door's weary but wide-eyed itinerants walk out into a swarm of capitalistic possibility — with a boisterous Nina Simone number, anachronism be damned — I couldn't help but be reminded of one character's pithy assessment of American bureaucracy: "What a modern vision!" — Akiva Gottlieb