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Blog by Don Kennedy

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The Visitor

The Visitor is written and directed by Thomas McCarthy who ironically also has a bit part in Baby Mama. With wry wit he shuffles the largely unknown cast through this heart warming story. Richard Jenkins of Six Feet Under snags a plum role here for a mature actor as Walter Vale, a detached Connecticut professor reluctantly sent to New York to deliver a paper he’s co-authored at a globalization seminar. As he drives his Volvo station wagon that suggests a former extended family into the city, little does he realize his ivy league sensibilities are about to run smack dab into some of the painful effects of globalization. He finds his pied a Terre rented out to a scammed young Muslin couple but when they offer to leave he takes pity on them and offers to let them stay for a couple of days. Zainab is a jewellery designed from Senegal and Tarek is a Syrian jazz musician who starts teaching Walter how to play African drums as a bond develops among the three. An innocent mistake on the subway gets Tarek arrested and to Walter’s horror it appears that his guests are in the country illegally. What follows is an uncomfortable display of corporate incarceration and rigid xenophobia in the post 9-11 world. Tarek’s mother from Michigan shows up with terrifying memories of imprisonment without due process that she left behind in Syria. She brings a spark back into Walter’s life but will the immigration lawyer that he hires to defend her son be able to save him from deportation? Regardless, the experience that he finds himself thrust into puts feeling back into his dark life.

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