The Visitor

I watched this movie last week with my wife – the Visitor. Its a quiet, intense drama – the kind of movie I usually dodge in favour of lighter fare. I’m happy to have seen this one, however. It is a movie about post-911 immigration policy in the US and how compassion (or indifferent justice) and the debate on immigration, asylum, and refugees in the end affects the lives of people – sons, mothers, and friends. It also touches on the privatization of prisons.

I’m don’t claim to know how close the scenario played out in the movie matches what happens in the US, or in Canada – but it makes me want to find out.

A deeply moving drama built around longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, The Visitor is a simmering drama about a college professor and recent widower, Walter Vale (Jenkins), who discovers a pair of illegal aliens who were the victims of a real-estate scam living in his New York apartment. After the mix-up is resolved, Vale invites the couple–a young, Syrian musician named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend (Danai Gurira)–to stay with him. An unlikely friendship develops between the retiring, quiet Vale and the vibrant Tarek, and the former begins to loosen up and respond to Tarek’s drumming lessons as if something in him waiting to be liberated has finally been unleashed. All goes well until Tarek is hauled in by immigration authorities and threatened with deportation. His mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), turns up and stays with Vale, sparking a renewed if subdued interest in courtship. However, the wheels of injustice in immigration crush all manner of hopes in post-9/11 America. Vale soon realizes that he has unexpected anger over Tarek’s plight, and the positive changes to his personal life that emerged from a deep involvement with his friend and Mouna might be the only legacy he takes from this experience. Writer-director Thomas McCarthy has created a wonderfully measured story about change and renewal and put it all on the shoulders of Jenkins, a largely unheralded but masterful performer whose time for renown has surely come. –Tom Keogh [IMDB]

I had hoped to be able to point you to an iTunes rental, but the movie doesn’t appear to be in the Canadian iTunes catalog. You can order it from Amazon, though, or do as I did and rent it at BlockBuster.