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Trailer for "Golden Door"

Having entered the screening of The Golden Door with no particular expectations or anticipation, it took me a little while to identify the feeling that it had produced in me by its midpoint. That feeling, by no means unknown but certainly rare, was one of privilege, arising from being given the opportunity to see a part of the world in a new, unexpected light.

The film’s original Italian title is Nuovomondo—“New World”—which at first seems more appropriate for a story about immigrants coming to America in the early years of the 20th century. Presumably the American distributors (Miramax Films, showing a welcome return to the kind of accessible, high-quality import with which they first made their name) wanted to avoid confusion with the Terence Malick film of the same name from a few years ago.

For once, the new title is actually more appropriate. It comes from the last line of the Emma Lazarus poem emblazoned on Ellis Island (“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”) and represents the light at the end of the tunnel that is this story. This is not a film about immigrants making a new life in America, but about the journey, spiritual and physical, through which they came here.

We follow Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato), a widowed farmer in Sicily whose life is not appreciably different from his ancestors over hundreds of years. It is approximately 1910, and in the few decades since the invention of the steamship made transoceanic travel a possibility, the great wave of emigration to America is in full force. Salvatore’s own brother went there many years ago, and now he has decided to make the journey himself along with his two adult sons. Though she is reluctant to leave, Salvatore’s aged mother also decides to come with them.

Their decision is fueled equally by hard times where they are and the imagination of what wonders lay ahead. Those who left send back tales of their new lives, sometimes accompanied by doctored photographs showing vegetables larger than the farmers that raised them and trees that grow gold coins. It never occurs to a man like Salvatore, who is illiterate and has never seen a photograph of any kind, that these pictures are anything less than real.

The Golden Door takes place in three sections: the Mancuso family’s preparation for the trip; the voyage on the boat that carries thousands of travelers in cramped quarters; and their experiences on Ellis Island, the final hurdle before what they hope will be paradise on earth.

Stories of the painful battles faced by immigrants on their arrival in a country that was neither as open nor as prosperous as they had come to believe are not rare, and writer-director Emanuele Crialese is after something different. In the minds of these travelers, there was an almost impossible chasm between their old lives and the ones they hoped to attain, a chasm that they were given a mythic ability to bridge. Without sugarcoating the difficulties they faced, Crialese presents their story in a dreamlike texture, filled with events and images that are seen but not always explained. Salvatore’s transition from a man of the old world to one of the new takes place aboard the ship, where he first begins to truly understand both his limitations and his abilities.

Some viewers may be bothered by the things in the story that go unexplained, particularly the character of Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a well-bred English woman who is making the crossing with the Italians. To some degree she’s a plot device to let Crialese present some hard information about the procedures followed by immigration officials at Ellis Island. But she’s also part of the mystery that envelopes this film of wrenching separation and transcendent hope.

Fortuitously arriving in theaters at a time when our attitude toward immigrants is so hotly contested, The Golden Door makes us think of what so many of our own ancestors went through in coming to this land. It is unquestionably one of the year’s best films.