As you all know, we in the UK tend to be a bit behind the curve on most American releases, so I didn’t get to see Tom McCarthy’s wonderful “The Visitor” in time for our mid-year review. Had I done so, it certainly would have been in contention for my ‘best of the year so far’ title. (Happily, Blake recognised it in his contribution.)
The film opens in the UK tomorrow (July 4 — an auspicious date for a film that challenges American ideals of liberty quite insistently) and, amid the summer movie crush, is getting a fair amount of publicity here, including this interesting piece in last weekend’s Guardian. Drawing comparison to such indie word-of-mouth successes as “In the Bedroom” and “Junebug,” critic Damon Wise believes that McCarthy’s gentle, wry but politically impassioned film could make a similar dent in awards season:
Normally, articles about the Oscar race appear in late November, once the studios have dusted off their A-list movies. But almost every year when the noms come in, there’s a film that leaves everyone scratching their heads because it seems to have appeared from the ether: it’s the film that came out ages ago, got some good reviews but didn’t do so well at the box office …
Today’s strangers arrive unannounced, and after the surprise appearance of In The Bedroom at the 2002 festivities, the industry now realises that there is no pattern any more: they can come from anywhere. Which, coincidentally, is, in some ways, the plot of The Visitor, a film that ticks several potential nomination boxes – it features a powerhouse central performance, it ponders on the flaws and foibles of being a so-called normal human being, it finds drama in the everyday – and it does it really rather well.