Golden Door (Nuovomondo.)

Like the grandparents of Martin Scorsese, who introduces this film, mine took precisely the journey depicted therein, from Sicily to Ellis Island, and in fact my grandfather’s name was the same as the lead character’s. So this sumptuously visualized film -- directed by Emanuele Crialese and shot by Agnes Godard -- had to work hard to lose me, which it almost did, with an uneasy hybrid style that could only be called “magic neorealism.” We start with hardbitten reality and wind up in a gorgeous dream, losing the documentary quality while the fantasy fails to convince, even while wowing the eye. The English title is totally misleading, since this film never gets as far as a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and the “New World” is glimpsed only in the fabulous hopes of those who are driven to immigrate. When one character opens a door from an intake examination room at Ellis Island, he faces a wall of bricks, which may be an historic observation or may be a symbol as subtle as a ton of bricks. One uneasy hybrid that does work is the appearance of Charlotte Gainsbourg as an Englishwoman who mysteriously falls in with the Italians in steerage. Still, there are some amazing extended shots in this movie, some stylized to perfection (a view from above as the ship departs, literally dividing the people aboard from the people on shore) and some that go over the top to excessive pictorialism (the ravishing but escapist overhead view of newcomers swimming through a river of milk.) So -- beautiful pictures, and an important story -- but it doesn’t come close to the greatest of all immigration films, Jan Troell’s The Emigrants and The New Land, with Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. (How is it possible that magnificent pair of masterpieces have never made it to DVD?) (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-74.)