“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Emma Lazarus
The other night my wife and I watched Emanuele Crialese’s 2007 film, Golden Door (Nuovomondo), which depicts the conditions confronting and endured by many Sicilian immigrants when they emigrated to America. Most left behind family and sacrificed all that they had known, a way of life that extended generations into the past and rooted them to a land which, now had become barren and was no longer able to sustain them or their dreams. The magical land of milk and honey beckoned, money rained down from its cerulean skies nourishing the poor, and, from shore to shore, this vast heartland had work for all who sought it.
Crialese’s allegorical journey of poor Sicilian immigrants was uneven but unquestionably poignant. While the agreement between Salvatore and Luce echoed a theme generally characteristic of arranged marriages, the notion of romantic love that was implied to be at the heart of their relationship seemed unlikely especially since the first time they meet is literally moments before they board the ship to America: an illiterate Sicilian peasant and a mysterious English woman don’t allay one’s skepticism for the authenticity of such an improbable alliance. My grandmother wed my grandfather when she was merely a teenager of fourteen years and he, fourteen years her senior at 28. It was a union that was negotiated without my grandmother’s consent by her father and my grandfather. I approached my grandmother once to ask if it were true that her marriage was arranged. When she acknowledged that it was true I plied her with another question. Did you love grandpop? She paused, as if to acknowledge the same stoic resolve that Salvatore’s mother resigned herself to when she was barred from the new world, then spoke softly, in time, I grew to love him.
The harsh conditions in which the villagers lived mirrored reality in that they were consistent with images revealed in letters written from Sicily by my great uncle to my grandfather who made the voyage to America by himself when he was 22. If the sparse terrain of the film’s opening scene was indicative of the environment, one could understand why the urge to remain and to endure was not irresistible; the hard scrabble landscape scoured constantly by the wind eroded one’s hope while one’s spirit withered in the pitch of darkness and languished in the thrall of empty nights. It might be argued that any future is preferable to present despair; at least the horror of what might be has yet to become.
While a carrot the size of a tree trunk floating on a river of milk was meant to conjure the kind of fantasy only a starving man could imagine as opulent, it was difficult not to chuckle at the glaring orange member to which our protagonists cling as if to save themselves–but from what? Imagery and metaphor are enhanced by good dialog; Crialese’s story would have been better served by telling more and relying less on a vague montage of images to fill the skeletal outline of his screen play; limits offer perspective. The surreal elements, which are inserted repeatedly through vignettes of waking dreams, are more distracting than effective. The scene where Salvatore’s mother plies her magic incantations while hovering over the supine form of a young woman was hauntingly reminiscent of my own experiences when I was a young boy. The memory of my Sicilian grandmother holding me on her lap, touching me on the forehead and eyes with the medal of an appropriate saint, and being mesmerized by her rhythmical invocation of a special incantation for whatever illness I was suffering at the time, still remains vivid and oddly soothing more that a half century later. My thoroughly American father not only rejected her magic and superstition, he also resented her interference. I don’t recall if my health was ever improved by any of my grandmother’s interventions, but regardless of their efficacy, I always found those episodes immensely comforting, which may intimate a causal connection that those uneducated and illiterate villagers found so difficult to verbalize or to repudiate.
While the big arms of America promised to embrace them, many immigrants suffered at arms length from the largess they believed they would enjoy. The golden allure of open doors was often tarnished by the fear of the unknown, the tension of diversity, the unpredictable outcome of novelty. Too often doors were simply locked and those with the keys did not share William Blake’s vision:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
