Away from the Netflix publicity machine, online-only film releases are rarely advertised or visibly scheduled in the same way cinema releases or even DVDs are. Some of the best ones come my way by word of mouth, or entirely by chance. So it was only from a friend’s tip last week that I learned that a title whose UK release I’ve been waiting years for has recently, quietly slipped into the streaming realm – available via the BFI Player, among other outlets. As perhaps the decade’s greatest American film to escape British cinemas entirely (no, not even in a festival context), James Gray’s The Immigrant deserves a little more fanfare than that.
A director who has been unassumingly carving out a very distinct oeuvre of burnished, throwback crime films and elegantly broken character portraits for 25 years now, Gray is used to being sidelined. Apart from in France, where he’s hailed as a non-blood heir to Coppola, his films have battled for attention beyond a dedicated core of converted critics. The Immigrant was the second of Gray’s films to be creatively meddled with, and subsequently commercially stifled, by Harvey Weinstein himself. It premiered in competition at Cannes in 2013, to reviews so damning, from British broadsheets, in particular, that no local distributor ever picked it up.
Not everyone agreed, myself included. I thought it the standout of that year’s fine lineup, an operatic, coming-to-America melodrama set in the grandest era of silent cinema, from which it happens to take many of its stylistic cues – albeit in rich, lyrical voice and blazing, bronzed colour. “Marion Cotillard’s best performance” is no modest claim, but this film can quite credibly make it: as Ewa, a Polish Catholic ingenue who washes up on Ellis Island with a tubercular sister and woebegone New York dreams, she channels the close-up soulfulness of such screen tragedians as Garbo or Gish.
Equally magnetic is Joaquin Phoenix as the internally gnarled pimp who effectively buys Ewa and then possesses her heart. The savage, toxic, tragic romance that ensues is more conscious and critical of the era’s dire gender politics than it initially lets on, though that awareness doesn’t cut into its soaring cinematic classicism and eye-ravishing formal beauty. Darius Khondji’s cinematography cloaks inky shadows in molten gold. Film lovers here are poorer for never having seen it on a big screen, but its magic survives the small one.
It’s a good moment to brush up on Gray, as he readies his seventh and most expensive film – the sci-fi adventure Ad Astra, with Brad Pitt and Ruth Negga – for a possible Cannes debut. In anticipation, you can watch Gray’s sombrely auspicious 1994 debut Little Odessa, a Russian-American crime family saga made when he was just 25, via iTunes.
Two of his other collaborations with Joaquin Phoenix can be found on Amazon: We Own the Night (2007), a superb, steel-blue variation on the Russian mafia theme, and the spare, old-fashioned heartbreak of love triangle Two Lovers (2008), which might even make you nostalgic for the pre-Goop Gwyneth Paltrow. Amazon Prime is streaming Gray’s mostly grandly gorgeous film, 2016’s mournful historical exploration epic The Lost City of Z. But his excellent 2000 film The Yards, another undeserving casualty of Weinstein mishandling, is currently awol from UK streaming outlets: the legacy of one of our best working film-makers still isn’t quite as firm as it should be.
New to streaming and DVD this week
Widows
(Fox, 15)
An A-grade ensemble and Steve McQueen’s sharpest directorial moves give the Lynda La Plante romp a sleek-as-onyx makeover.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
(Warner Bros, 12)
The first film was already franchise-milking, but had some pizzazz; this just goes through the motions.
Damsel
(Universal, 15)
Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska commit to the eccentric cause in this fresh, slightly precious comic western from oddball US auteurs the Zellner brothers.
Death in Venice
(Sony, 15)
A solemnly handsome Criterion Collection rerelease for Visconti’s still-sublime Thomas Mann adaptation, in all its decayed splendour.
Triple Frontier
(Netflix)
One of Netflix’s starriest originals – Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac and so on – is a strictly rote military thriller from the usually interesting JC Chandor.
