PeaceBang

“The Visitor:” A PeaceBang Review

April 24, 2008 on 11:40 am | In TV/Movies/Theatre/Book Reviews |

I am preparing for a five-week sabbatical and a bit swamped, so I don’t have time to give this beautiful film the detailed review it deserves.

So maybe you should just read the Rolling Stone review here and hie yourself to a theatre to see it yourself as soon as you can.

What I loved best about this film was that it featured eminently decent people living through a crisis with no gratuitous scenes of sex or violence designed to manipulate the viewer’s emotions and raise our blood pressure to create the sensation that the movie is something more than it is (”The Brave One,” I’m talking to you!).

Richard Jenkins, the wonderful character actor you’ll remember as the father from “Six Feet Under,” has the role of a lifetime as Walter Vale, a widower whose life is changed by an encounter with a Syrian and Sengalese immigrant couple. You definitely want to see this on the big screen; it’s a film about faces, eyes, small shifts in expression that communicate depths of emotion that can never be spoken.
Hiam Abbass, as the mother of the Syrian man arrested in the subway and held in detention, will break your heart with her feminine dignity and ordinary-wife-and-mother beauty.

I think Richard Jenkins should get a big, fat Oscar for this performance. I would double vote for him because not only is he brilliant in this film (I will always love Walter Vale), he was the artistic director for the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Rhode Island for years, and that’s just plain cool.