"The Visitor" Movie Review

I'm back, Lisa...with another movie review. Try to contain your excitement.

So I watched The Visitor the other night (and I now know how to italicize movie titles in my posts, but still not in my post titles). It stars Richard Jenkins, who is best known as Late Nate in the best TV show that ever was, Six Feet Under. It's written and directed by the same dude who wrote The Station Agent, which some of you may remember as a lighthearted tale about a super-depressed, lonely, drunken, but still inexplicably hot midget who lives in a train station and befriends a young black girl and a super-manic Bobby Cannavale, as well as a grief-stricken Patricia Clarkson. I'm pretty sure I myself was a drunken midget, or at least a drunken normal-sized person when I watched that movie, as it took me a while to remember many details about it, but some internet research brought it all back to me. I do remember really liking it though.

Anyway, The Visitor kind of works in the same style, in that it's a quiet movie, about a quiet man, but this one isn't a drunk, or a midget. Just repressed and sad. Now that I think about it, he is drinking wine in pretty much every scene, but not in a sloppy way, so perhaps my newly-sober eyes are just making too much of that point. So he's the sads, and the lonelies, but then his world is opened up by some illegal immigrants he finds shacking up in his NYC apartment that he rarely visits. The male illegal immigrant is Syrian and an awesome African drummer and all-around hep cat, and the female one is Senegalese, and frankly, quite a bitch and a ball-buster for the first part of the movie anyway. So wouldn't you know it's the cool Syrian dude who gets popped by the federales? This too is one of those slow, not a whole whole lot happens kind of movies, but the writer/director guy (whose name escapes me, but apparently he co-wrote Up too, so, y'know...talented) has a way of holding my interest anyway. Maybe because his characters feel real, and bad shit does happen to them, but not so much that it seems fake or cliche. I liked the non-pandering to the audience ending as well, and also how it definitely had a political point, but one that seemed organic to the story and not just tacked on for show. And the drumming really is pretty fucking cool. And Richard Jenkins--what a winner this guy is. So overall, if I'm going to continue with my somewhat embarrassing rating system of using Randy Jacksonisms, I'd have to say that "America, we got a hot one right here!"