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In its last hour, The Emigrants becomes airier, more lyrical. Some burdens, for these people, are beginning to lift, and the film lets them enjoy it for a while, before their new lives reveal new rigors. They look, as if for the first time, at the world around them; Troell gives them cool green forests, serene rivers, glittering lakes, and birds in flight.

We're the best of friends." That's the endearment that a married couple, played by Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, whisper to one another in Jan Troell's The Emigrant. For anyone familiar with von Sydow and Ullmann's collaborations in the filmography of Ingmar Bergman, it's a deeply moving moment as much for its narrative context as for its metatextual implications.

Nearly half of The Emigrant's three-plus hours is devoted to explaining why the Nilssons decide to move from Sweden to North America, which feels like overkill; there are only so many compelling variations on "the soil here isn't great" and "religious intolerance is a drag," and they don't collectively add up to an entire normal-sized movie of 90 minutes or so.

[Troell's] ultra-attentive camera creates everlasting images, like a little girl walking next to an emptied bowl of porridge (we learn she's burst her stomach); his inventive editing generates knockout sequences, like a nightmare trek toward California gold country. Troell's visceral poetry is extraordinary. Von Sydow killing and gutting an ox and sheltering a child in the carcass beats anything in The Revenant.

Troell disregards mise-en-scene in the traditional sense; aside from landscape shots, not a single frame would work in a Bergman movie. By pushing viewers through history one tiny, unrecorded experience at a time, Troell breaks down tidy preconceptions about what constitutes a "scene": life presses forward, but only as quickly or as slowly as the characters are feeling it.

It's very slow, subtly acted, and if you can last the course, quite moving. Troell not only directed, but also photographed, co-scripted and edited the film, which becomes something of an assertion of human courage, determination and dignity.

The acclaim for this 1971 151-minute revisionist epic on the settlement of America still mystifies me. Uncommitted, tedious, and often dishonest, Jan Troell's movie works all of the obvious chickenhearted changes on the Fordian model. Instead of epic sweep it has slow, lumbering forward movement; instead of nobility it has scratching desperation. But all of the scrupulous "realism" does not stop Troell from indulging in sentimentality.