The Visitor

The Visitor is a small indie film that adeptly examines the theme suggested by its spare title from a couple of different levels. There is the college professor who has given up on living, he's merely visiting his life. And then there's the refugees in the U.S.A., hoping for a chance at a better life, but relegated to a surreal limbo-like existence, outside of the official bureaucracy.

Richard Jenkins stars as the barely alive college professor - inspired casting given his experience as the spiritual dad in the classic tv series, Six Feet Under. What kind of actor, by the way, takes a role in a series where his character is killed off in the first scene? Okay, granted, his ghostly presence made regular on-screen returns, but still.

Unknown to the professor, a refugee couple have rented out his Manhattan apartment (we never find out why exactly he maintains an apartment in NYC which he rarely visits - something to do with his late wife, we presume). The professor shows up for a conference. Surprise! Surprise! But he lets the couple stay. Tarek is from Syria - a musician specializing in African drum - a form of music that captivates the professor and gradually re-invigorates the professor's life - that and a visit from the Tarek's mother.

To its credit, the movie does not engage in any heavy-handed proselytism of the evils of the refugee process. It simply presents the refugees as people - and lets the circumstance and treatment speak for itself. "Everything changed after 9-11," one character remarks. Perhaps, but there has to be a better way to address the plight of these human beings.

Doubt

The film, Doubt, based on the play of the same name written by John Patrick Shanley, tackles a controversial topic by shrouding it in layers of uncertainty and, of course, doubt. The storyline contrasts the dagger of suspicion against the presumption of innocence. Yet, by choosing such a button-pushing subject, the purported sexual abuse of an altar boy by a Catholic priest, the author casts illumination on his theme, while simultaneously introducing complexities that deflect from the central issue. Questions of race and motherhood, spreading an implication that the boy - and thereby accusing all such victims - brought the abuse upon himself.

"It's his character," the mother defends and lashes out in the same breath, "just leave it alone, let him graduate in six months."

This melodrama - unbelievable and socially unacceptable, yet tugging at threads of race and impoverished hope - highlights another problem with this story. It is a not a piece of fiction for fans of subtle intricate plots - no, the archetypes are front and center, the contrasts obvious, the dialogue rising to a crescendo at the end of every scene. The cold wind blows through doors and windows left ajar, a disapproving god chilling the hearts of his wayward servants, lost and full of doubt.

On the positive side, this filmic adaptation of the original play is visually stunning, making the most of the change in medium. And the acting is stellar - Meryl Streep inhabits the role of the morally superior nun with headstrong certainty (at least until the final scene), while Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays the priest with a believable combination of sanctimony and not-quite-innocent vulnerability.

Burn after Reading

Finally, an intelligent comedy that engenders some real laughs. Burn after Reading is a dark, sarcastic take on the internal workings of the CIA. Created from the warped minds of the Coen brothers, the film alternates between absurdist reality and out-of-control hilarity. Imagine the movie Get Smart if the Coen brothers had been given control. J.K. Simmons is perfectly cast as the incredulous upper management type (e.g. the Chief), while John Malkovitch rages as the intellectually pompous (and alcoholic) ex-agent whose firing triggers the ridiculously simple plot. The only false step is provided by Brad Pitt whose over-the-top portrayal of a semi-moronic fitness instructor reminded me too much of his tick-ridden psych inmate from the classic Twelve Monkees.

The death of the novel

Just as Nietzsche declared that God is dead, and Fukuyama proclaimed the End of History, the death of fiction (at least in form of the written word) is upon us. The short story is long gone, poetry rendered irrelevant without a backing beat, and now the novel as a piece of art is relegated to the trash heap of history - though, since history is done, the meaning of this is unclear.

We're talking about the literary novel, of course, a form of long-winded expression that is capable of describing a moment in human civilization, of circling and enveloping and describing in detail the arc of a people, from birth to death, from passionate love to saturated hate, from selfless sacrifice to narcissistic obsession, from the dregs of slavery to the glory of freedom, from the horrors of war to the whispered soliloquy of peace.

This means that the literary novelist is an obsolete figure. Lament the disappearance of Dickens, Dostoevsky, of Camus and Tolstoy, even Twain and Hemmingway. We will never see their like again.

Yet the panderings to the mass-market, the populist fare that somehow captivates the

appetite of the multitudes with its nutrition-free offerings, survive and prosper.

But the success of the pop-literati is not the full story. Somehow the examination of the large issues

in life, be they philosophical, political, economic, scientific or ethical, have been relegated to the non-fiction aisles (nonwithstanding the James Frey pseudo-controversy). Fiction, as they teach us, is all about personal stories - alive with peculiar detail of the lives of these fabricated characters - in order that we can identify, so that we can delve with vicarious pleasure into these

fictional realms. As a result, however, the fiction lacks the social context to deal with, in a meaningful manner,

the issues of the day.

Of course, my musings are not original. Ironically they were repeated recently in a Globe and Mail article describing the Infinite Summer blog, created by a group of people who've dedicated their summer to reading the novel 'Infinite Jest' by David Foster Wallace. This book is revered by some as a modern classic, a thousand page plus tome (with copious footnoted asides) that rivals the masterworks mentioned above.

Perhaps this was the last NOVEL ever written. Certainly, it was the last novel by this author - he committed suicide while attempting to write a followup.

I suppose I should read it then. If only I had an infinite summer.