Good Monday to you dear Listener; it’s Professor Doctor here. We haven’t invested a lot of time in the ongoing conversation discussing smaller, independent-style movies; there’s no agenda there – it just happens that way. But I have asked the Maestro to consider giving ‘The Visitor’ some of his hard-earned and valuable time, after I saw it last week. It deserves the kind of intelligent, witty, and dare I say it, heartfelt, exploration that The Listener has come to know and, hopefully, love on The Film Talk.
In keeping with our policy of not discussing the film in advance of the show, I’ll have to keep my depper opinions to myself for now; but I think I can get away with this: ‘The Visitor’ deserves your time because it is a serious attempt at telling a story about people who feel real, and who encounter real problems and hopes (grief, the possibility of new friendship, the tortuous negotiation of the US immigration system, learning to play the djembe); the Maestro may tell you that one of the reasons he doesn’t consider contemporary US ‘indie’ drama to be a source of enthusiasm for him is that these films are rarely told with visual flair, and in that regard, why not just make them into plays or novels? And I think, as I often do, that the Maestro is right. But Tom McCarthy, whose previous film is the utterly beguiling ‘The Station Agent’, knows how to frame human beings talking, and while what’s in the physical image is important, I think (and I know the Maestro does too) that a movie that conveys heart but may lack the photographic nuance of Henri Cartier-Bresson (or Henri Alekan, or Vilmos Zsigmond, or Robert Elswit) might still end up being the most engaging film I’ve seen all year.
