Seattle The Visitor

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Free Classifieds Seattle, WA

Genre: Drama
Release Date: 04/25/2008
Running Time: 108 mins
Director: Tom McCarthy
Cast: Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira
Producer: Mary Jane Skalski, Michael London
Writer: Tom McCarthy
Distributor: Overture Films
Offical Site: Click Here
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Box Office

Michael Jackson's This Is It, 23.2 mil, 34.4 mil
Paranormal Activity, 16.4 mil, 84.6 mil
Law Abiding Citizen, 7.4 mil, 51.5 mil
Couples Retreat, 6.5 mil, 87.0 mil
Where the Wild Things Are, 5.9 mil, 62.7 mil
Saw VI, 5.3 mil, 22.5 mil
Astro Boy, 3.5 mil, 11.3 mil
The Stepfather, 3.2 mil, 24.6 mil
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, 3.1 mil, 10.8 mil
Amelia, 3.0 mil, 8.3 mil

Movie Title, Weekly Earnings, Total Earnings

The Visitor

The Station Agent's writer-director, Tom McCarthy, follows up that surprise success with another self-consciously whimsical tale of an unlikely threesome—except this time he decides to get political, making a liberal-guilt-trip movie about first-world ignorance of third-world culture. When recently widowed Connecticut economics professor Walter Vale (the excellent character actor Richard Jenkins, in an unfortunately fussy, mannered performance) returns to his long-untended Manhattan apartment, he finds it occupied by a young Syrian emigre, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), who've been swindled into thinking that the place is theirs. In the first of several dastardly turns toward the pious, Walter lets his unexpected houseguests stay on, in return for which Tarek teaches him how to play the African drum, and the grieving Walter starts to get his groove back. Then the ugly face of post-9/11 racial profiling comes along, landing the undocumented Tarek in a government detention center and spurring Walter's outrage that such things can happen in the supposed Land of the Free. (Who knew?) Nothing if not an equal-opportunity patronizer, McCarthy loads up the rest of the film with examples of Muslim-on-Muslim discrimination and self-consciously ironic flashes of pro-liberty propaganda. He undoubtedly means well, but he's made one of those incredibly naive movies that give liberals a bad name, and does more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it. — Scott Foundas