Historians will find much to like in The Immigrant. The film includes a star-studded cast, including three Academy-Award nominated actors: Marion Cotillard (who received the Best Actress Academy Award in 2008 for her role as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose); Joaquin Phoenix (for his roles in Gladiator, Walk the Line, and The Master); and Jeremy Renner (for his roles in The Hurt Locker and The Town). The Immigrant has impressed some critics, with Cotillard and Darius Khondji receiving the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and Best Cinematographer, respectively, for their work on the film. But these are not the primary reasons to see it.

Ewa Cybulski (played by Cotillard) and her sister Magda Cybulski (played by Angela Sarafyan), orphaned adult Polish refugees from the Great War, arrive at Ellis Island in 1921. During processing, Magda is diagnosed with tuberculosis and immediately quarantined by immigration officials. Ewa is stranded. Her predicament worsens when she is accused of engaging in “immoral” behavior during the Atlantic voyage. Only later do we discover that she had been raped. Ewa—alone, isolated and in line for deportation—is suddenly rescued by the smitten and charming Bruno Weiss (played by Joaquin Phoenix) from the Travellers' Aid Society. Bruno bribes an Ellis Island official who releases Ewa into his custody.

Ewa is not without resources. She has a nurse's education and prosperous relatives residing in Brooklyn. Upon arrival in Manhattan, however, we learn Bruno is not really a representative of the Aid Society but a low vaudeville theater manager. He's also a pimp. Ewa remains resolute, resisting Bruno's attempts at seduction and the temptations associated with commercial sex. But Ewa is without money and desperate, determined to get her sister released from Ellis Island; she is confronted with a series of inescapable and cruel choices. The Inferno beckons and Bruno ultimately coerces Ewa into prostitution.

But then a redeemer appears. Emil, better known as Orlando the Magician (played by Jeremy Renner), who is also Bruno's estranged cousin, encounters Ewa, first at Ellis Island and then at Bruno's theater, cynically named “Bandit's Roost” (a clever reference to the notorious alleyway and photograph in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives). Emil is a homeless, itinerant performer with a moral streak. Love-struck, he refuses to judge Ewa, recognizing her precarious circumstances. Rather, Emil offers to take Ewa to another promised land—California, where “the sun is always shining”—once she is reunited with her sister. The hatred between the cousins is magnified as each of them fall in love with Ewa. Predictably, the familial tension and romantic competition devolves in violent confrontation and the murder of Emil. When a jealous member of Bruno's harem tries to pin the homicide on Ewa, he arranges for Magda's escape from Ellis Island. Bruno, responsible for rescuing Ewa from deportation, encouraging her descent into prostitution, and removing her sister from Ellis Island, bids her a tearful and remorseful adieu.

Director James Gray successfully recreates an authentic visual encounter with early twentieth-century New York. While earlier films such as Elia Kazan's America, America (1963) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1974) included scenes from Ellis Island, The Immigrant is reportedly the first to be actually filmed at the location. Gray admittedly reconstructs the world his Ukrainian grandfather confronted during his immigrant experience: the crowding in the Great Hall; the babel of languages; the callous disinterest of Ellis Island officials; the necessary bribery to escape parts of the immigrant purgatory; the confusing food (evidenced when Ewa attempts to eat a banana for the first time, peel and all); and the holiday visit of Enrico Caruso (played by Joseph Calleja) to sing for the new arrivals (a scene that generated disbelief from some reviewers, but appears historically accurate).Footnote ¹ Although Cotillard is a French and English-speaking actress, her German-inflected Polish consciously reflects Ewa's Silesian origins.Footnote ² Visually, Gray and Khondji consciously invoke the artistic verisimilitude of New York's Ashcan School painters, notably the social realist and sometimes violent New York of George Bellows and the mysterious sensuality in the concert halls and variety theaters of Edward Shinn.

For Gray, New York's sexual underworld is a convoluted, byzantine milieu. Bruno's character is loosely based on Max Hochstim, a Lower East Side concert saloon proprietor and Tammany politician whose Independent Benevolent Association was a leading fraternal front for prostitution on the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century. Bruno's female accomplice is Rosie Hertz (played by Yelena Solovey), arguably the most famous New York madam in the early twentieth century and Bruno's “boss,” as she reminds him.Footnote ³ Bruno's harem of young women live in his and adjoining tenements, but none suffer from overcrowded quarters; they sport fashionable styles and enjoy plentiful spending money. By immigrant standards, they have it made. Ewa nevertheless resists the initial overtures and material benefits while simultaneously being schooled in the trade by the other female stage performers in a bathhouse. But eventually she is compelled to participate in a Bandit's Roost performance, ironically as “Lady Liberty.” Bruno plays the master of ceremonies for a series of cheap vaudeville acts, culminating with his “doves” parading across the stage, stripping and servicing the lurid, cigar-chomping, drunken male audience—“animals,” in the words of Emil. When Hertz evicts Bruno from the theater for his violent behavior toward Emil, Bruno moves his operation to Central Park, auctioning the young women off as the debutantes and daughters of New York's upper crust in a tawdry and tantalizing setting. These and other scenes evoke the beautiful ugliness, the horrifying sensuality, the tender but mean streets of the early twentieth-century city.

But most effective is The Immigrant's careful rendering of the incongruous interior worlds of the protagonists. At first, the plot seems to mimic the “fallen woman” stereotype as Ewa slowly descends in the world of commercial sex. Is this just a resurrection of Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)? Or another tale of “white slavery”? Rather Ewa and Bruno embody the problematic paradoxes of the pimp and the prostitute. Bruno's initial empathetic kindness is quickly followed by verbal outbursts of cruelty. He recognizes and admires Ewa's sibling devotion: “Your sister's well-being is more important than your own.” He then proceeds to manipulate that empathy to his own sexual advantage. Ewa acknowledges her perplexing confusion: Bruno “made it so I could stay,” she states on one occasion, only to later admit: “He makes me feel like a piece of trash.”

Ewa's quiet beauty, however, hides a steely resolve. She will do what she must to rescue her sister. She may prostitute herself, but she is never a prostitute. Despair, much less suicide, is never an option for Ewa, however wracked with Roman Catholic guilt she may be. “I am not nothing,” she proclaims on the eve of her deportation hearing. Ewa's subtle but intense Catholicism grounds her: she urges Magda to pray while in the medical inspection line. Her frequent Marian devotions—”I prayed to the Mother of God”—sustain her. In a concluding scene, she begs forgiveness in the privacy of the confessional: “I used my body for money,” she laments between the tears. “All souls can be saved,” the priest responds.

Ewa's prostitution is pragmatic: simply the best but horrifying option among a series of miserable choices, a transitional moment, a transitory event, a short-term strategy motivated out of familial love and heartfelt devotion to her sick and stranded sister. It is not a journey with no return. What was an unspeakable action when she stepped off the boat and into the Great Hall happens and is quickly forgotten. It is time to move on.

These contradictions converge in Bruno's soliloquy in the Ellis Island finalé. Bruno, his face puffy, broken and bleeding from a police beating for failing to turn Ewa over for arrest, proclaims his devotion to her. But the psychological scars prove too forbidding. Immersed in personal and economic worlds structured around manipulation and exploitation, he cannot escape the bewildering emotional cycle of affection and contempt for Ewa. “I love you but I couldn't help using you like all the others,” he proclaims in a tearful breakdown. For once, we feel sorry for him; so does Ewa. She recognizes the paradox: Bruno saved her from deportation, protected her from arrest for murder, and finagled the release of her sister; yet, he simultaneously facilitated her descent into the sexual abyss. Bruno, she perversely acknowledges, “suffers for me.” Head downcast, Bruno orders her to “Go and forget about me,” an inadequate and tragic plea for forgiveness. She does both.

The Immigrant is worth seeing. And more than once.