The Visitor

Your life is in a rudd. You lie to your boss, all inspiration for the job you once loved is gone and your wife has passed away. You are just going through the motions. That is what David Jenkins is facing who got an oscar nomination for his excellent performance. Nothing happens in his life. A glass of wine is the highlight of his day, sitting alone in his house. Untill he accidentally gets involved in the lives of 2 illegal immigrants who fire up his life in unexpected ways. David Jenkins feelings are portrayed with such delicacy that you must admire the director for these subtle choices. The whole movie breathes a feeling of the sweetest melancholy further enlightened by a gorgeous soundtrack and luminous photography. When a director can make a boring and solitary man look human and caring then you have made a real gem. It is such a truly caring movie that I get goosebumps writing about it...

This is the movie which can feel power to have of the music. Two people of Walter and Tarek totally different in both the race and the viewpoint become a friend through music. And Walter who a wife dies, and shut a heart grows up interiorly. His growth is the highlight of this movie. Him who heard only classical music, he comes to be interested in a musical instrument called jembe and African music by Tarek and cohabitation with Zainab. Music has the tendency by a district and a country, but the music is originally free. The music disturbs an obstacle of a race and the age and can be absorbed. It appears in the scene that Tarek teaches Walter how to play the jembe and plays for the first time. His figure to play while being embarrassed is totally like the boy. However, this work is not the movie which merely conveys power of the music. It is a claim that music is limited in the modern society. It is the movie which a pain is left in a heart after having finished looking.

2008 flick 'The Visitor' is a brave story, of a brave man, made in the most sensitive manner. The film's script it strong and on you-face types, the biggest strength of 'The Visitor' is that is vows to be different. A film that doesn't offer glamor, but pure ecstatic cinema. A winner all the way, in terms of its niche. Final words, Visit this one indeed! Pluses of the film: Bold script. Very-well directed. Performance by Richard Jenkins deserves an ovation. Words fail to describe the veterans performance. He's fantastic in each and every frame. His Oscar-nomination doesn't come as a surprise, him not winning comes as a surprise. Others are decent, but its Jenkins show all the way. Minuses: The film starts on a slow note. On the whole this Visitor, is surely welcomed.

I love Flannery O'Connor's outsider in such stories as A Good Man is Hard to Find and the Displaced Person; the Visitor was also about people who visit and change things. And the film did not disappoint me. College professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) finds a couple living in his infrequently-visited NYC apt. One squatter is Syrian, the other Senegalese. The simple plot involves the changes that not just the visitor goes through. It lingers like a slow European character study with only one climactic moment when circumstances change everything. The music motif binds visitors in mutual acts of kindness. What I really like is that not everything turns out well because of that charity. People keep on truckin,' as in real life.

If The Visitor were made in 2007, how come Richard Jenkins was nominated for best actor of 2008? This is a very unusual film with a subtle performance by Jenkins as a widowed college professor who befriends a couple staying in his Manhattan apartment. How did these people ever get the apartment? Did Jenkins know the person who rented the apartment to them. Jenkins, as Prof. Walter Vale, is a very dull, uncaring individual who has taught for 20 years. When he meets the foreign couple, he lets them stay in the apartment and he takes an interest in banging the drums. The film shifts gears when the male friend is arrested and it is determined that he is an illegal alien. The film concentrates on the harshness of the immigration service. Why not? 9/11 occurred, didn't it. There is a brief tinge of romance when the arrested youth's mother comes from Michigan to visit her son. The ending is a definite downer and Vale goes into the subway to bang on the drums. Is this out of frustration?