by Francis Friel

Synopsis:

Marion Cotillard comes to Ellis Island from Poland with her sister, who is immediately quarantined on the island. Joaquin Phoenix (an actor and pimp) and Jeremy Renner (a fucking magician of all things) are the two weird assholes who offer her protection and help. 

Review:

I thought I'd heard this was some kind of masterpiece or something? Seriously? I really didn't get it. This was literally just another movie. Really. Nothing really stood out to me, not the direction, the story, the acting, anything. Nothing at all. Yet people were cutting each other's heads off when this came out to pile on the praise. I'm so confused. I want to understand this movie. I really do.

Is it that life for young Polish immigrants in New York in 1920 was not a beautiful paradise? Is this news? 

Is it that life, in general, is terrible and all we can hope for is to not be completely miserable from time to time? 

Is it that you can live a life of pain and "sin" but eventually, if you meet the right combination of white men, things will kinda sorta work out? Are any of these themes dominant? Is it just a mishmash of all three, kinda sloppily just thrown together and smeared with sepia tone? Uh. Um.

And speaking of, yeah, I worship Gordon Willis just like anyone else but can we get away from making every single movie set in this era look like THE GODFATHER PART II? C'mon, moviemakers. Do something new, interesting, something. This movie is goddamn hideous. They're going for that GODFATHER look but ended up with something closer to TWIXT or TETRO, just a bad weird muddy cg desaturation. 

I haven't even talked about the script yet. There wasn't one. I bet this would've made a halfway decent book. Was this based on a book?

And Joaquin is terrible in this, incredibly. While Hawkeye is actually not bad. He's actually pretty good. How'd James Gray do that??

Cotillard, I can only imagine, had some kind of scary debt hanging over her head that month and needed some quick cash (she's still as good as always, though).

Overall Score: ????/!