The Golden Door

Posted by Nathan Deen (nathan@filmschoolrejects.com) on July 21, 2007

“God only knows how long we’ll be stuck here,” says Fortunata Mancuso, the talkative grandmother played by Aurora Quattrocchi in the insufferably boring movie about immigration, “The Golden Door.” My thoughts exactly. Maybe I’m missing the big picture here, but I feel this has to be one of the most overrated films of the year. There just wasn’t anything special here that aroused my attention and left me with a feeling of anxiety, wanting to leave the theater. I felt like Bart and Lisa on a long road trip, screaming “Are we there yet?”

The film follows the Mancuso family (Italian) and an English woman, Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and their journey to America, the year is not specified. The intentions of this film may look good on the surface but it’s not until you actually watch the movie when you realize how painfully difficult it is to watch. The film is intentionally slow-paced, so slow that it can only create an impatient viewer.

There are three acts in the film: the setup, the departure, and the arrival. The setup isn’t as concise as it should be, there’s a good thirty minutes before we actually get somewhere. It’s more of an introduction to a way of life. We can only hold the “The Golden Door” at its word that this is an accurate account of how these people of a small Italian village lived. These characters, the Mancuso family, are strange and hold superstitious beliefs similar to that of an African tribe.

The family is headed by Salvatore, the father who dreams of coming to America, like his brother before him. His mother is Fortunata, who complains a lot and has no intention to moving to America but is dragged along anyways. Salvatore has two sons: Angelo the eldest and Pietro, a deaf mute. He also has two daughters: Rosa and Rita. There’s not much to say about any of the characters because the setup is more devoted to the surroundings of the Italian countryside and depicting how this miserably poor family lives by showing day-to-day activities.

“The Golden Door” is a step by step process, and as a result, could very easily put you to sleep. When they finally board their ship, there is a shot of that ship slowly casting off away from the dock foot by foot. The entire movie is that slow. Surprisingly, this film has very little dialogue. It’s just two hours of people doing next to nothing.

The father of the family, Salvatore (Vizcenzo Amato) meets Lucy, who is looking for a man who can support her. Just before they get to America, they agree to marry each other, just like that. At this point, the film has a heart, but no soul to go along with it. A musical score has been almost entirely absent.

The one scene during the journey that has a musical score is an odd one, like something out of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” or “The Science of Sleep.” The scene shows Salvatore and Lucy swimming around in what appears to be a giant sea of milk, with a giant carrot floating around them. It’s shown again at the end of the film. Maybe it’s supposed to symbolize something but it could take me an eternity to figure out what. It’s in this scene I realized this ship was sailing towards disaster.

The only decent act of the film is the third when they finally arrive to Ellis Island. But the film is still a lifeless, tedious step-by-step process. With the scenic shots of Italy we see in the beginning, it strikes me as odd that we never get a shot of New York, or the Statue of Liberty. No shot like this to offer us or the characters a sigh of relief, knowing that they finally made it. Then I realized the film was trying to say that the journey wasn’t over yet, it had only just begun. An almost endless list of tests and procedures and forms awaited them and we have to drag it out with them.

“The Golden Door” wants us to feel the same exhaustion and impatience the characters on this journey are feeling. It accomplishes that but because the movie is so dreadfully boring, it didn’t make me care about the characters and thus I couldn’t share their hopes and dreams of coming to America. Overall “The Golden Door” is like a poor man’s version of “Titanic” and it definitely hits an iceberg or two on the way.

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