If you haven’t yet seen James Gray’s The Immigrant, make a beeline for the Gene Siskel Film Center next week, when it returns to Chicago for its second run. One of the major achievements of recent American movies, Gray’s immersive period piece channels the raw emotionalism of silent melodramas and Italian opera without coming off as nostalgic or studied. Despite the film’s impeccable artistry—not to mention the rave reviews it received at the Cannes Film Festival and during its commercial run in France last fall—its U.S. distributor, the Weinstein Company, almost didn’t release it theatrically in this country. Up until spring it was rumored that The Immigrant would be released here direct to DVD and video-on-demand services. Thankfully, that didn’t happen; Darius Khondji’s cinematography and Happy Massee’s production design demand to be appreciated on a big screen. Still, the Weinstein Company did its best to stymie the film’s commercial potential, refusing to advertise it or even notify the press it was coming out more than five days in advance.
Blood Ties and Gambit, two recent American genre films that didn’t screen in Chicago but are now available on DVD, feel like dispatches from the disappearing middle. Both feature name actors, quality production values, and middle-aged protagonists struggling to find self-respect. Neither film transcends the conventions of its genre—crime drama and screwball farce, respectively—but then neither aspires to. The pleasure of each derives in part from how the filmmakers play with those conventions and shape them to fit the characters and themes. Neither one is all that great, though I found them both refreshing in their unironic appeals to tradition. I would sooner revisit either in a theater than any of the adolescent-minded genre films I’ve had to review this season.
I don’t want to pass off Gambit as a Cowardesque comedy of manners; the film has plenty of visual humor and even one fart joke (which is one of the movie’s better-timed gags, in fact). Still, Deane’s unacknowledged identity crisis communicates the sort of grown-up ambition that’s getting edged out of American genre entertainment.
Gambit ★★ Directed by Michael Hoffman PG-13, 88 min.
