The Visitor

THE VISITOR (2007) - Sept. 15, 2007
This started out really really well, and ended really really badly. About a college professor whose life is changed when he goes to New York and finds a young couple living in his apartment. For the first forty-five minutes or so I was loving this film. Richard Jenkins gives a perfect performance in the main role, and the characters become people we really care about. It's really well directed and well written, and the whole thing just works. But then, in an embarrassingly cheesy scene that seems to come from another movie (the first of many), the main character's friend gets arrested after a misunderstanding in a subway station. It's all downhill from there. The film goes from a wonderfully understated character study to a ham-fisted Message Movie. It's clear that the director has some very strong opinions on the way immigrants are treated in post-9/11 America, and he pretty much spends the rest of the film cramming them down the viewers' throats in the absolute least subtle way possible. It's never boring I suppose, but it's a definite shame because it could have been a great movie. **1/2