* RATING: PG-13 for brief graphic nudity. * RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes; in English and Italian with subtitles. * BOTTOM LINE: A beautiful but static depiction of an Italian family's experience coming to America.
There is a single image in "Golden Door," writer-director Emanuele Crialese's drama about Italian immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, that may haunt you for days. The scene begins with an overhead view of a crowd of people. Suddenly and silently, a diagonal fault line appears, cutting the crowd in two.
As the rift widens, we realize it's the view of the boat leaving the dock - forever separating those who are striking out for a new land from those staying behind. That is one of the several gorgeous, evocative images that Crialese ("Respiro") amasses in this film, depicting every step of the journey from Italy to Ellis Island. But those images are housed, like a great exhibit in a museum with overly long hallways, in a sluggishly paced narrative.
The early 20th-century immigrant experience is depicted through Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato), a Sicilian farmer and widower who decides to strike out for America. He takes along his aging mother, Fortunata (Aurora Quattrocchi) and his sons, good-looking Angelo (Francesco Casisa) and deaf-mute Pietro (Filippo Pucillo) - even though doctors in Italy warn Salvatore that the Americans may send Pietro back. In Italy and on the boat, Salvatore encounters Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg, the alluring star of "The Science of Sleep"), an enigmatic Englishwoman travelling alone.
There is a rich marriage broker (Vincent Schiavelli, who died just after filming) setting up unattached women to eligible Italian men, and Lucy looks to Salvatore to keep her from a forced betrothal. The second half of the film, as Crialese details the Americans' rigid and bigoted IQ tests, is more interesting than the long slog getting the Mancusos onto the boat. And Crialese occasionally lights the darkness with hints of magical realism - such as the dream images of Salvatore and Lucy swimming in the "river of milk" he has heard exists in a strange land called California.
But for all its beauty, "Golden Door" is a lumbering beast that - like the passage to America itself - seems to take forever to get where it's going. * RATING: PG-13 for brief graphic nudity.
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