First-Class Passage

By JAY COCKS

THE EMIGRANTS

Directed by JAN TROELL

Screenplay by JAN TROELL and

BENGT FORSLUND

The land is harsh, the people poor and desperate. In the early 1850s a group of Swedes from the province of Smaland pack their few belongings and emigrate to America in hope of a better life. There, Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) stakes out a fine farm for himself, his wife (Liv Ullman) and family in the Minnesota woods.

A rigorously simple and familiar saga, The Emigrants is made eloquent through the tone and the telling. Director Jan Troell gives life and substance to what Willa Cather called "the precious, the incommunicable past." Indeed, at its best, The Emigrants has the same feeling for landscape and incident (a man proud of a pair of new black boots, a death and burial at sea) that glistens in Cather's best work.

There is a distant quality about The Emigrants, a kind of intangible emotional reserve. The cast is superb; there are surely no better film actors in the world than Von Sydow and Ullman. But the director cannot make us feel the desperation and the destinies of his characters. Elia Kazan's America, America was not so elaborate or well sustained as The Emigrants, but Kazan's film had the impact of personal experience. The Emigrants has the accumulation of exquisite detail and close observation; it lacks intensity.

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