Golden DoorTitle: Golden Door
Director: Emanuele Crialese

This 2007 Italian film, written and directed by Emanuele Crialese, is truly, in the words of New York Times film critic A. O. Scott, a “beautiful dream of a film.” In its subject matter, as well as its imagery, this movie compellingly shows us very specific lives shaped and guided by waking nightmares and the dreams, goals, aspirations, and ideals born in response to them.

“Golden Door” is the story of the Mancusos, a poor Sicilian family at the turn of the 20th century who migrate to the United States, looking for an answer the grinding poverty of their Old World lives. This is an archetypal American story: the yearning and the quest for The American Dream. This tale is grounded in the story of very real and particular individuals, and the very real losses and pain this quest for The Dream brings for them.

The waking nightmare starts in rural Sicily. As the camera beautifully shows, the Mancusos live in a land of literal stones, a place that cannot sustain the lives of people who have lived there for generations. The movie opens with two barefooted and tattered men, the brothers Salvatore and Angelo, scrambling up a stony mountain, each carrying a large stone in his mouth. They arrive at the summit and place their bloodied stones on a large pile of stones as a petition or prayer to the spirit or saint of this mountain, asking to find out whether they should stay in Sicily or go to America.

The answer to their entreaty arrives in an appropriately dreamlike fashion. The third and youngest brother, Pietro, comes up to them at the stone shrine to show them postcards that picture America as a place where coins hang from bushes, onions are the size of donkey carts, and chickens grow as big as donkeys. On the basis of these seemingly ridiculous photos, the decision is made to head to America.

Salvatore is the dreamer of the family, both literally and figuratively. He experiences several visual dreams, a melding of daydreams, sleep dreams, and visions that give him hope. He experiences coins falling from the sky onto his face, like a gentle, tinkling American rain of prosperity. Several times he sees himself swimming in a sea of milk, happily arrived in America, the land of Milk and Honey.

For the Mancusos, home, the land of family and familiarity, has become inimical to thriving if not physical and emotional survival. The solution is to leave and move to a completely unknown new territory. The Italian title of the movie is “Nuovo mondo” which means “new world”. The contrast and conflict in these people’s lives is between the literal and metaphoric Old World and the New World. The known world is familiar and restrictive; the other is new and possibly nurturing, but completely unknown. The English title of the movie, “Golden Door,” refers to the tantalizing American Dream. The door referred to comes from the famous Emma Lazarus poem about the Statue of Liberty, inviting the huddled masses of European immigrants to come to motherly America.

The film’s characters, while very real and earthy, at the same time are archetypal or mythical, as indicated by their names. The strong, vibrant, and persistant male is named Salvatore, meaning “savior.” His mother, the matriarch is called Fortunata, meaning “the fortunate one.” The next oldest brother is Angelo, the “angel.” The youngest brother is Pietro, the “stone,” or Peter, the first disciple of Christ. The mysterious Englishwoman on their journey is Lucy, or “Luce” in Italian, signifying “light.” Their story is the outline of countless other people’s stories.

Sicily as seen in the movie is an unforgivingly hard land of rocks and infertile soil. The natural landscape is strewn with stones of all sizes. The village consists of walls and streets built of these same stones. We see the brothers eating stones. As in a fairy tale, the land is abundant with the basic ingredient of stone soup; however, these people have none of the other ingredients needed to make it into a soup containing any nourishment.

America, in contrast, is the territory of dreams for the Mancuso family, the land of Milk and Honey. It has no more reality for them than a sleep dream. It is completely unknown to these people, other than its fame as a fabled land of plenty.

In leaving their home, itself a nightmare, the Mancusos experience a series of new, waking-life nightmares. They go by horse cart to the Sicilian port where they are assaulted by a hubbub of grasping humanity. They travel in the hellish hold of a ship across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to Ellis Island. The hold is dark and crowded with people and families from all over Italy, foreign and often hostile to each other, related only in their common misery and desperation.

Ellis Island turns out to be a nightmare of a different sort. The immigrants lose their identities in the bowels of the bureaucratic immigration beast. They are endlessly poked, prodded and tested to ensure that they are “fit” to be granted entry through the Golden Door. Nothing makes sense here, they are completely unrooted and ungrounded. What worked in their Sicilian village is of no value here. All individual nuances and differences are erased as they are transformed into generic “immigrants”.

All of the Mancusos are made mute in Ellis Island. Since they don’t speak English, they cannot question or directly interact with the American beaurocrats. Their voicelessness makes them powerless. Lucy, however, a mysterious Englishwoman, has the power of language and acts as a translator for them. At the end, threatened with deportation, Pietro, who has been mute throughout the story, speaks. The New World has forced him to regain his literal voice.

The New World demands of the Mancusos that they become someone and something radically different than they have been. Their Old World identities and connections are of no value here. Their very humanness is under constant question. If they wish to be granted entry to the New World, they must learn a new set of rules, a new way to understand themselves.

Once they forsake the inhospitable island of Sicily to go to another inhospitable island, New York, these people become permanent Exiles who have lost Home. They have become emigrants and immigrants. Sadly, when they reach their dream land, they will remain emotionally, if not physically, homeless.

Ellis Island is a powerful waking-nightmare that is counterpoised against and concurrent with the American Dream, as well as with the personal dreams of each person seeking entry into America. The immigrants are made to struggle fiercely in order to hold onto their dreams of hope in the face of the nightmare. The movie does not show, but the viewer knows, that once they leave the immigration island and are granted entry through the Golden Door, these dreamers will face tremendous adversity and prejudice in establishing their new lives. The American Dream will continue throwing nightmarish stones of harsh reality at them. The Golden Door will continue to be slammed shut in their faces.