The Visitor

The Visitor is a quiet story of friendship and the realities of being an illegal immigrant in a post 9/11 detention center filled world. It is also a Participant Film, which makes me happy and proud! The story centers on a college professor by the name of Walter Vale (played by the amazing Richard Jenkins) that has reached a point in his life where everything is routine.  When he leaves Connecticut and returns to his New York City apartment he find two illegal immigrants, Tarek Khalil and Zainab,  living there,  his life gets turned upside down.

What makes The Visitor a special film is that it takes some very serious issues, illegal immigration and detention centers, and places them is a very real and well told story about people that everyone can relate to.

A.O. Scott had some really great things to say about the film in his New York Times review and I think he gets it completely right when he said:

To summarize Mr. McCarthy’s film as I have is to acknowledge some of the risks he has taken. It is possible to imagine a version of this story ” the tale of a square, middle-aged white man liberated from his uptightness by an infusion of Third World soulfulness, attached to an expose of the cruelty of post-9/11 immigration policies ” that would be obvious and sentimental, an exercise in cultural condescension and liberal masochism. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to imagine it any other way.

And yet, astonishingly enough, Mr. McCarthy has. Much as “The Station Agent” nimbly evaded the obstacles of cuteness and willful eccentricity it had strewn in its own path, so does “The Visitor,” with impressive grace and understatement, resist potential triteness and phony uplift

It isn’t easy to make a film that successfully gets across an important message and important information about the way in which our world works while still telling a powerful and simple story rooted in human emotion.   When Walter finally reacts to the fact that Tarek has been sent to a detention center and cannot be reached, you can’t help but feel his same disgust:

Prof. Walter Vale: [Walks up to the phone number on the wall, walks back to the window] You can’t just take people away like that. Do you hear me? He was a good man, a good person. It’s not fair! We are not just helpless children! He had a life! Do you hear me? I mean, do YOU hear ME? What’s the matter with you?

Watch this film to see how it pushed the envelope and then takepart with The Visitor’s social action campaign.

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