To the uneducated Sicilians, the doctored postcards from America are the same as photographs. When they see the pictures of money literally growing on trees (coins sprout like leaves) or a chicken the size of a calf or an onion as big as a prize pumpkin, they think they are looking at the promise of a new land. Widowed farmer Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) takes those images as a sign that now is the time to go to America and find his identical twin.
He has two sons, one of whom is a deaf-mute whose condition could bar him from America, and a strong-willed elderly mother. He also must escort two young women promised to husbands in the New World, and he finds a soft-spoken Englishwoman named Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg) attaching herself to the Mancuso party before they board the boat. "Golden Door" is the story of their passage to America and what awaits them there.
Before the huddled masses yearning to breathe free can step onto the mainland, they must submit to undignified checks for diseases, demonstrate an aptitude for puzzles and submit to quizzes about rudimentary math and other skills. The Americans don't want people of below-average intelligence mixing with their population, one official declares. The film, set around 1910, takes its name from the Emma Lazarus poem at the Statue of Liberty, which concludes: "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
" Written and directed by Emanuele Crialese ("Respiro"), it's an eye-opening look at the conditions behind the Ellis Island passenger manifests now available with the click of a computer mouse. Crialese re-created Ellis Island, by the way, in Buenos Aires but allowed Sicily to play itself. "Golden Door" is the backstory to the American Dream, a testament to the immigrants who trade their possessions for third-class passage to a world where rivers of milk flow through California -- or so the rumor goes.
The conditions are primitive and crowded, and when the steamship hits a rough patch, passengers are tossed from side to side like a nightmarish amusement-park ride, without benefit of lap bars or belts. Scenes aboard the ship are tightly framed and claustrophobic, an indication of strangers in steerage who sleep inches away, close enough to smell the garlic necklace worn as protection in one case. Once on Ellis Island, the newcomers are marched through corridors with machinelike efficiency.
"Golden Door" manages to mix superstition and fantasy with a clash of cultures and optimism. Salvatore is Old World and Lucy is New World, and they are among a United Nations of newcomers. Gainsbourg gives her character an air of mysterious reserve and class while Amato, who looks like a younger, thinner Alfred Molina, makes his Sicilian farmer a dreamer, risk-taker and protector.
Aurora Quattrocchi, as his mother, is appropriately stubborn and defiant, and the late Vincent Schiavelli turns up as a matchmaker of sorts. "Golden Door" gives us few of the standard arriving-in-America shots. When the ship finally approaches New York, it's wrapped in fog, prompting one passenger to ask, "Where's America?
" Crialese gives us the answer when he skillfully walks us to the golden door. Rating: PG-13 for brief graphic nudity. Mostly in Italian, with English subtitles.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.
shns.com. To the uneducated Sicilians, the doctored postcards from America are the same as photographs.
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