The early promise of "America" tends to look drained, ironic, or just corrupted these days. From Minutemen to Lou Dobbs, border anxieties have made erstwhile dreams of milk and honey pretty much impossible to imagine. Once, and long ago, however, the U.S. offered possibilities, mythic, large, and potent.
Emanuele Crialese's wondrous, inspired "Nuovomondo" ("Golden Door") remembers such promise with a mix of exhilaration and delicacy, peppered with judicious insight. It charts the journey of an oddly shaped, determinedly loyal family, the Mancusos, from rocky, weather-beaten Sicily to the glorious unknown of Ellis Island. Their decision is made by 30-something patriarch Salvatore (Vincenzo Amato) after scaling a stony mountainside to reach a shrine and deposit a stone he's carried in his mouth for what might have been miles. His mouth is bloodied, his feet battered, his pants frayed.
And still, he and teenaged son Angelo (Francesco Casisa) have sought the summit, where they ask for guidance. When they are greeted by Salvatore's other son, the mute Pietro (Filippo Pucillo), they believe it's a sign -- he brings with him postcards showing the new world's bounty, picturing trees sprouting coins and a giant chicken.
Resolute and proud enough, the men gather up their meager belongings -- and put on new used suits of clothes and boots -- and set off, with Salvatore's aging mother Fortunata (Aurora Quattrocchi) and a couple of young local women betrothed to American men (their father warns Salvatore, "They must arrive as they have left, as decent girls"). At the pier, they discover chaos and cacophony, swarms of would-be travelers pressed up against one another, checked by physicians, urged to purchase bottles of liquid that will, say their vendors, cure everything from bad teeth to Pietro's lack of voice.
Amid the hustle and bustle, Salvatore spots a pale, alluringly red-gloved British woman, Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg) whose solo traveling garners attention and gossip. She sees in his poignant eyes a potential protector, and, following a briefly acknowledged, off-screen payment to an unseemly fellow, she slips up the gangplank with the family.
Their departure is perfectly dramatized in a striking, single image. The camera looks down on two crowds -- on board and on land -- both waving as the ship pulls out, slow, groaning, full of expectations and fears. From here the ship becomes their home for weeks, their spaces close (the sleeping area is stacked with bunks just large enough for slender bodies), supposedly dividing up the men and women.
Fortunata resists Lucy's enigmatic charms, thinking her an unfit match for her courageous, generous son, but it's not long before the long days and worse nights (pitching in tight spaces, bodies tossed into one another) lead to what seems irresistible intimacy. Indeed, when Lucy looks after a woman shocked by the death of her infant onboard the ship, she suddenly doesn't look nearly as hoity-toity as before -- the girl knows how to cope with hardship.
Throughout the harrowing voyage, Lucy seeks ways to manage her landing. She understands that she must have a man -- or at least the promise of one -- in order to enter the States, and so she appears to bargain with the wealthy broker Don Luigi (Vincent Schiavelli), who murmurs, "I could very easily find someone who could get you out of this mess," leaving the "mess" undefined.
He introduces her to wealthy older suitors as she casts glances across the deck at the increasingly love-struck Salvatore (these passing and panning, point of view shots are lovely, as each exquisitely tries to look at the other while not performing it publicly). Salvatore imagines himself swimming in a river of milk, then grabbing onto a giant carrot alongside Lucy in order to keep afloat. When at last, on the mist-shrouded deck she asks him to marry her, he says yes without a second's thought, even as she cautions that it's "not for love."
On their arrival at the Island, the ship's passengers are subjected to even more abusive circumstances, prodded by guards and examined by doctors, instructed in loud English. "It's highly unusual for an Englishwoman to be traveling with Italians," Lucy is warned. "You'll be questioned about that."
Everyone is questioned about everything, tested for "intelligence," asked to answer simple math problems (numbers of pigs and chickens) and put blocks together (Salvatore ignores the flat, fitting-within-a-box model and instead builds a house). "We're trying to prevent below average people from mixing with our citizens," explains one examiner. "What a modern vision," says Lucy, her jaw set.
The women are assembled in groups of 12 or so, set down in a room and essentially auctioned off to American men, some holding bouquets in an effort to seem civil. The women's perspective shows lumpy, awkward faces, the men look on compliant-seeming, nervous prizes, their headdresses and costumes assemblies of old-world wedding gear.
Lucy holds her breath when she spots the broker Luigi in the back, angling to have her matched with his client. Down the hall, Fortunata resist answering questions and seeming subjected. "What do you want from us?" she asks, "Folk from the old world?" Following a translation, her uniformed interlocutor sits calmly, then explicates, "We want to know if they're fit enough to enter the new world."
Such efforts to maintain distinctions between vecchio and nuevo are both acute and absurd. As "Golden Door" reveals repeatedly, the integration of cultures -- exemplified in the tentative, elegant, evolving bond between Lucy and Salvatore -- is at once magical and mysterious. The immigrants dream of riches, hope for survival, and speak, at last. And as they come to articulate their experiences, their desires and their losses, they imagine themselves into new lives. "Golden Door" rates as a 7 out of 10. (C. Fuchs)
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