This movie is a story of immigration, told by following a peasant who travels to Ellis Island with his mother and sons. Salvatore is a widower, living in a craggy village in Sicily; like every other Italian we see in the movie, he speaks no English. He is illiterate. With (literal) visions of money growing on trees, he heads off to America, envisioning immense vegetables growing in the fertile soil. But these fantasies are as romantic as the film gets; in many ways what it made me think of was a sort of anti-Titanic. In that film, poor boy Leo DeCaprio stows away; we don’t see him stuffed like a sardine into the cots provided to the third-class passengers here. We also don’t see what would have awaited him had he made it to Ellis Island. He’d have been examined for defects mental and physical, and deported if found wanting. The Kate Winslet figure, an Englishwoman mysteriously traveling on a boat full of Italians, is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg. Well-dressed, carrying herself with a slightly regal air, and traveling alone, she’s the object of much speculation among the other passengers. But she too will be turned away unless she can find someone to marry her.
And there I’ve told you 80% of the plot. If a fast-paced story or conventional romance is what you’re looking for, this movie may bore you. Precise detail, from the smudged clothing and dark fingernails of the emigrants to their assembly-line processing at the end of their trip, is the movie’s forte. Writer-director Emanuele Crialese spent a year researching Ellis Island and poring over the letters of the people who passed through there. He tells the story without sentimentality, though not without tenderness. The camera work eshews grand vistas for carefully framed shots of people in close quarters. There is only a little music. The result provides a better look than any text book at what it must have been like to leave everything you’ve known and go somewhere new, what it was like to become American.
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