THE plaque attached to the plinth supporting the Statue of Liberty quotes from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “New Colossus”.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Writer/director James Gray’s intense drama opens with a shot of Liberty shrouded in fog. The next two hours are spent demonstrating a microcosm of the US failure to honour those sentiments a mere 35 years after the statue’s dedication.

In the arrival hall on Ellis Island in 1921, health inspectors separate Polish sisters Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Magda. Immigration officers accuse Ewa of immoral acts on the ship. From here the plot accompanies Ewa in her travails and confrontations with federal, state and municipal laws as she tries to earn money to pay for Magda’s hospitalisation. The suave Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix) greases palms to get Ewa ashore on the mainland. And we know what Bruno’s expecting Ewa to do in return, don’t we?

Emil (Jeremy Renner) performs an illusionism act in Bruno’s burlesque theatre where Ewa unwillingly dances in a small company of young women whom men from the audience can have in an upstairs room for $2 a pop, half for the woman, half for Bruno. Two men now desire Ewa who never loses sight of her main purpose – Magda.

It’s strong stuff, its period reconstructed with impressive verisimilitude and filmed in muted colours and lighting, its dramatic impact suffused with an ongoing sense of gloom amid its poverty and depravity. The three principal performances (Cotillard, Phoenix and Renner) are powerful. And the emotional pitch is as you might expect – bleak until the last reel.

At Palace Electric