A Life's Pursuit: Why Strangers May Be Your Best Friends

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Why Strangers May Be Your Best Friends

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Growing up, I recall being constantly told not to talk to strangers. I’m sure I would have heard it even more had I been female. Anywho, we are taught from a very young age to be wary of strangers, people we don’t know or don’t look like us. Growing up in the South, I was very accustomed to being told where not to go and what not to do because of my color; but not from folks who didnt look like me, from those who did. I am certain it was out of safety and concern. Afterall things are much different now ... right?

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Anywho, I rented this movie called the Visitor. Of course I was thinking SciFi; but this was none of the sort. The plot is as follows:
The Visitor is a contemplative drama filled with subtle humor and a lot of humanity/passion for its characters. Walter (Richard Jenkins, "Six Feet Under") is a widowed college professor that meets two illegal immigrants - a Senegalese woman (Danai Gurira) and a Syrian man, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) -, living in his apartment in NYC. After the initial discomfort of the situation, Walter decides to help the young couple and an unlikely friendship is born.

"The Visitor" deals with human relationships and discusses post-9/11 America socio-political issues (the plight of immigrants, xenophobia, etc.) with no hidden agendas. Director McCarthy has proved himself as a sensitive director/writer, and he extracts an astounding performance from Richard Jenkins, a character actor who gets his first leading role at the age of 60. Jenkins is rivoting to watch as an ordinary man trying to find himself while being confronted with his own conceptions about the world around him.


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This is a terrific movie that really transforms your ideas of the things that really make the human race the better animal. Tiny moments of greatness will hurl you through a string of emotions that will leave you wanting more by the end. I don’t know that this movie or its participants ever got their just due; but they should have. It is a very tender story about some very prickly issues that we would just rather glass over and tip toe out of the room on before being asked to comment. In the end it is still a love story. In the end, love conquers all. In the end, what are we without it?

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See the trailer...


There are at least ten incredible points made in this movie. I will only pick three.
1) In our hearts, we are all the same. No matter what race, religion, orientation or etc.; we all crave to live out loud and be accepted. Each of us wants to be of some value to someone — to have a purpose that we were created for performing. In this our hope is that our lives arent meaningless meanderings from one reaction to the next.

2) There really is no “them;” just “us” next time. This movie does a wonderful job of showing diversity and singularity. Sure some of us a great at music, painting or calculus; but that doesn’t mean that we all have to be good at the same things. Sure we may go through life pretending that we are so much better than “those” people; but we all cry, we all bleed and we all die. Thus, are we really what we think of ourselves? I don’t know that you understand what it feels like to be profiled until you’ve experienced it. I don’t know that one understands someone else’s tradgedy until we have experienced our own. I do know that at the point of death, there is the most deafening silence I have ever heard. I don’t know that I could explain it to anyone who hasn’t heard or been there at the very last moment between life and death.

3) Love conquers all. It is that moment that we actually leave ourselves or open ourselves to be vulnerable to another living soul that we begin to go beyond feeling love to experiencing love. There is a point in this movie that you see the moment of switch and the subtle shift of emotion that goes from empathising to experiencing. You see some very different looking people who unite in their experience of love/suffering and become one race — human. I dont know why it takes tradgedy to distract us from our irrelevant differences. I dont know why chaos unites us when peace never could. I dont know why one man dies and another does not. I do know that all humans die and that makes us all equal.


Once love even conquered the grave so that others might live. Perhaps that alone shows the value of the human race; not the races of humans...but that was another Visitor.

1 comment:

Andrew Stanfield said...

There is no 'them,' just 'us' next time...one of the most profound phrases I have read this year. Maybe any year. I will definitely see this film.