"The Visitor": your purchase benefits LCC programming“The Visitor” is one of our favorite films of 2008 and is another endeavor from the socially-conscious Hollywood indie, Participant Media.

Walter, an unassuming academic, played in understated fashion by character Richard Jenkins, heads for New York to deliver a paper he co-wrote. He's kept an East Village walkup there for years, but when he unlocks the door, he’s startled to find two people living in his flat: A Syrian musician named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal. Both parties are unnerved and  embarrased by the encounter. Tarek and Zainab have been scammed into thinking they were living in the apartment legally and offer to leave immediately. Walter agrees that that's exactly what they should do, but realizing they have nowhere else to go, he changes his mind for reasons he clearly doesn't even understand. They should stay with him, at least for the night, until they can figure out what to do.

Cast and director of "The Visitor": Actress Hiam Abbass, Participant Productions director Tom McCarthy, actors Danai Gurira, Richard Jenkins and Haaz SleimanWriting in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek noted, “I'm afraid that describing the bare bones of "The Visitor"—in which a 60-ish widowed professor… reconnects with some previously lost part of himself after he befriends two illegal immigrants living in New York—only makes it sound like the kind of movie you drag yourself to see out of a sense of duty, one of those nice little pictures that's so timid it's incapable of either offending or exhilarating. But ‘The Visitor,’ written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who made his debut with the understated and beautifully shaped ‘The Station Agent’ in 2003, is pleasurable on so many levels that what it's about becomes far less important than what it is.”

Seattle Intelligencer critic William Arnold writes, “’The Visitor’ isn’t explicitly political, but its story line involves Tarek’s being arrested and threatened with deportation. He and his lover are both in the country illegally. Tarek’s mother, played by the soulful Hiam Abbass, arrives from Michigan to help Walter get her son out of detention. The ironies abound: In New York to deliver a paper at a global economics conference, Walter’s confronted with a personal matter of geopolitics. McCarthy nudges Walter and Tarek’s mother, Mouna, toward a tentative friendship with the promise of something more.”

The relationship between Tarek and Walter develops and deepens when they begin drumming together, Walter the clumsy student to Tarek’s warmly patient teacher. The film connects on several levels and invites multiple viewings.