The Visitor(2008)- User Reviews

...immigration law is not the focus of this film. Rather, it serves as a symbol for how people insulate themselves from others. Jenkins plays a man who has distanced himself from his colleagues, his students, his work, and from his own feelings. The story leaves him in pain and anger, but now he can express it with his drum playing; before he only smothered it. The chink in his armor was his loneliness, and we wish at the end it will take him to Syria. If the film has any political relevance, it is not the issue of immigration, but our relations with the countries of the middle east, which we view with suspicion and scorn. Perhaps Jenkins' character, and the film itself, can begin to change that.