It's a question of fairness

Questions of fairness confront a country and the humans in it every so often (if they are thinking type humans). Often culturally, as much as anything, we form a set of values that says this is right and that's wrong, but then something comes along to challenge those values.

The Visitor is a film to do that. It had been on my list of-- I should see that but it'll be hard to watch-- for a long time. I had thought to wait until I was in a relaxed mood, but maybe it wouldn't make a difference when I saw it for its impact.

It is the story of a lonely professor, Walter (played with depth and soul by Richard Jenkins), living in Connecticut, who is struggling to find meaning to his life after the death of his wife. He is probably in late mid-life and possibly a lot of his meaning had been coming through and with her. He has written books, taught lectures about global politics at a university, but he's doing as little of anything as possible as he just gets through the days.

Reluctantly forced by the university to go to New York City for a conference, he opens up the apartment, that he and his wife had maintained there, only to find someone living in it-- two someones. She, Zainab, is from Senegal and he, Tarek, is from Syria, and they thought they were authorized to be there by an unseen Ivan. They do not want to cause any problem and leave to find somewhere else, but Walter brings them back not knowing that both are in the United States illegally. They are part of the hidden underground that come into the country legally or otherwise but do not leave when their time runs out.

Tarek's vitality and music begin to change the rhythm in Walter's heart. The two very different men form a caring relationship. Walter is particularly drawn to Tarek's drum, called a djembe that is played by the hand and with a rhythm the musicians must find from within themselves.

That is the first half of the story and then it turns complicated, forcing Walter and the viewers to do some soul searching, when Tarek is first mistakenly arrested and then detained by immigration authorities. Walter who has seen global politics from an abstract, technical view is suddenly confronted with a personal reality.

A policy of secure borders has to mean you treat other people as though only rules matter and there's no way to consider individual cases? Rules are to be obeyed, cross each 't' properly, or you are out, laws are enforced by people with no more freedom to look at individuals than the ones who are in the prisons (and they are prisons whether we call them detention centers or not)? At least Tarek was not suspected of being a terrorist, if he had been, we now know things would have gotten horrendously worse.

Many of us think it's only fair to have a closed border. We want to have a world where all people are treated fairly. We want to maintain our qualities as a nation, but this is a film to make you ask-- what are those qualities? We came from immigrant ancestors-- every last one of us-- and the difference is only in whether we got here early or late. How do we fairly deal with that reality in the world of today where fear of terrorism has changed so much? How do we justify legally bringing people here for cheap labor and then sending them back to deny them citizenship?

Watching Walter try to deal with the immigration people, get a lawyer for Tarek, the viewer is likely to question their own values. I won't go farther with discussing the film, but I recommend it for all peoples as a film about human nature but especially here in America where we are still wrestling with questions of immigration and security. It came out in 2007 and is on Netflix.

If we are going to authorize things being done in our name, we should at least know what that means to real people-- and this film fairly and without being maudlin does show the human price.

It's good that I saw it and Il Postino close together because both show how the system sometimes tragically impacts ordinary people in ways that its citizens might not have intended or wanted. The question from The Visitor is-- what can we do about it?