London River

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in London on 7/7/2005, two parents arrive in search of their children: a white woman who lives in Guernsey, and an African man who comes from France, where he works. She is Christian, he Muslim. She is aghast at the changes in London: Muslims everywhere, including the neighborhood in which her daughter had a flat. When she arrives at the address, she incredulously verifies with the taxi driver that it is indeed the right place. He has lived in France for 15 years, has not seen his son in all that time, and arrives at the behest of his estranged wife to find their son.

Stephen Holden writes in the NY Times: Its stars, Brenda Blethyn and Sotigui Kouyaté, couldn’t possess more dissimilar screen presences. Ms. Blethyn, the British actress best known for “Secrets and Lies,” belongs to the Mike Leigh school of minutely detailed naturalism. Mr. Kouyaté, who died in April 2010 at 73, was associated for many years with the ritualistic theater of Peter Brook. Tall and gaunt, with graying dreadlocks, his deep-set eyes conveying a stoic, bone-weary resignation, he suggested a mythic African pilgrim leaning on a walking stick while roaming the world on an endless spiritual journey. “London River,” whose title evokes the city’s multicultural stream, was his final film.

A reviewer in the Telegraph UK praised it. Kouyaté, the Burkinabé veteran who died in April this year, won Berlin’s best-actor award, and it’s hard to imagine this film without his gangly, dignified stoicism at its heart. For Blethyn, who has sometimes been broad to the point o caricature, it’s a rare chance to explore a deeply plausible character from the inside out, reminding you how subtly she can handle reflexive, Middle England prejudice while keeping you on side. The film around them is timid at times, a little hemmed in by its own scrupulous humanism, but it still affords as moving an acting partnership as you’ll see all year.


In RottenTomatoes, it gets 90% - 65% marks, well illustrating how critics have a different (in this case, better) grasp of the artistry of a film.

I very much liked it.

White hunter black heart

powerful, intelligent, and subtly moving, a fascinating meditation on masculinity and the insecurities ... is the blurb accompanying a Rotten Tomtoes entry; critics on the site gave it an 88% favorable rating, while th epublic gave it 54%. I am not sure I'd give it 54, but, perhaps yes. The story is interesting: the making of The African Queen, or, perhaps the alomost-not making; the story focuses on John Ford and his poreoccupation with hunting. Marisa Berrenson portrays Katherine Hepburn quite nicely; the actors who portray Bogart and Bacall are terrible. Eastwood's acting is wooden; the script is terrible. 2 stars.

Abyssinian chronicles

Isegawa, Moses. (2000). Abyssinian chronicles. New York: Knopf.

Found this book by accident:  I was looking for books by Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro (who actually wrote The remains of the day, a book that became a Merchant and Ivory film), and saw this one; intrigued, I took it. Started to read it, and did consider that it would open up into a wonderful book. But it never did. Stopped at page 70. Perhaps I read one too many works of fiction in a row. Whatever the case, I moved on.

A reviewer was ambivalent about the book.

Books on Guilt

One is a series of "Five Best" columns that appear at the weenekd in the WSJ. In this one Pascal Bruckner confesses his admiration of these books about guilt.

1. The Trial. Franz Kafka.  Knopf, 1937.

One morning Joseph K. is arrested for no reason at all, brought before a court and, eventually, executed in a quarry: His ordeal has become a poignant metaphor for the experience of citizens in totalitarian regimes. In the eyes of the ruthless judicial system in Franz Kafka's "The Trial," Joseph K. is guilty of existing, no more than that; his crime is the very fact that he is alive. Nothing he can do can save him once he has fallen into the hands of the judges. The more he protests his innocence, the more he arouses suspicion. "Innocent of what?" one judge asks. "The Trial" (first published in German in 1925) is terrifying because the hero, without understanding why, begins collaborating with the machine that crushes him. One is reminded of the people convicted during the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s when they shouted, as they were about to be executed: "Long live Stalin! Long live the proletarian revolution!"

2. And Then There Were None. Agatha Christie. Dodd, Mead. 1940.

Ten people who have nothing in common find themselves on Indian Island. They have been invited there by a mysterious Mr. Owen, who has, unfortunately, not shown up. A couple of servants see to their comfort. On the living-room table the guests find 10 Indian statuettes, and in the bedrooms hangs a nursery rhyme announcing how each guest is to be murdered. The deaths follow one another implacably, hewing to the poem's predictions as though the characters' fates were foreordained. Everyone has sinned enough to deserve death; everyone bears the mark of Cain. Within this Puritan framework Agatha Christie displays her passion for playing with crime. As it turns out, one of the 10 guests is the murderer—and he knocks himself off as well, using a sophisticated technique to make it seem as if he has been killed by someone else. Christie's taste for trickery is stronger than her taste for punishment. Thus there is no tragedy in her work: Evil can always be overcome by a shrewd detective.

3. Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad. 1902.

In Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," an officer in the British merchant marine named Marlow sails up a serpentine African river to look for Kurtz, an ivory-trader from whom no word has been had for months. As Marlow ventures into the interior, oppressed by the dense jungle, he hears a strange report: In a mad quest for ivory, Kurtz has begun slaughtering the natives. Conrad took his inspiration from the atrocities committed by the Belgian King Leopold II, who was then master of the Congo and who tortured and massacred his recalcitrant subjects. Kurtz, of whom we get only glimpses, is fascinating because he speaks the language of the tormentor, not that of civilization: He feels no remorse; he is a man who never feels guilty. A pamphlet he has written on civilizing the natives ends with the terrible words: "Exterminate all the brutes!" He weaves a bond between the logic of profit and the logic of annihilation. Conrad's genius consists not solely in denouncing colonialism but also in anticipating the disasters that followed decolonization. We can read this short novel as a still-relevant depiction of the abominations that have stained the recent history of Africa.

4. The Fall. Albert Camus. Vintage. 1956.

At the height of the Cold War and communist domination over the French intelligentsia, Albert Camus published "The Fall," the brief confession of a "judge-penitent" named Clamens, who let a young woman commit suicide before his eyes by throwing herself into the Seine and did nothing to help her. Clamens has taken refuge in Amsterdam, preferring the canals' still water to the Seine's impetuous flow, and he likes to confide in strangers. He tells them that he does not regret what he has done—and then forces the strangers to confess, in turn, a crime of their own. I am a bastard, he seems to say, but so are you. Clamens practices public confession as kind of contamination, a way of implicating all humanity in his crime. The novel was an indirect attack on Jean-Paul Sartre, who was always ready to flagellate himself for being a bourgeois and to accuse France and Europe of causing all the world's ills. In the tradition of the 17th-century French moralists, Camus, concealed under this penitent's habit, denounces the moral hypocrisy of a certain kind of leftist.

5. The Human Stain. Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin. 2000.

Coleman Silk has been forced to retire from his professorship amid murky accusations of racism, an episode in which he lost everything—his job, his family, his reputation. Embittered, he visits his new neighbor, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, to suggest that Zuckerman avenge him by writing his story. We discover that Silk's main crime is having tried to escape the racial prison in which America incarcerates its citizens: Born black, Silk has passed himself off as a Jew to escape the stereotypes he might have had to endure. Refusing to accept being identified by the color of his skin is, of course, an offense that Silk's "tolerant" colleagues find intolerable.

—Mr. Bruckner is the author of "The Tears of the White Man" (1986) and "The Tyranny of Guilt," recently published by Princeton University Press. Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

The man who never was

Quite good. 1955. It worked quite well. Of course, there is a website for the operation itself.

Clifton Webb plays the role of Ewen Montagu, the British operative that masterminds the deception of the Germans, an operation to make them think that Sicily will not be the main objective of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1943. A body is sent as an emissary, his pockets filled with the every-day objects that any man would have; an attached briefcase contains documents that make it seem that Greece will be the main objective of the Allied invasion.

I became aware of the story in reading David Ignatius's Body of Lies. I have the book, written by Ewen Montagu, who was portrayed by Clifton Webb in the film.

Webb was born in Indiana, yet his English accent was quite good. His career was rather interesting: he did not make many films, yet had a handful of very good roles, including this one, Laura and Razor's Edge (nominated for awards for the latter two).

Gloria Grahame plays the role of a woman looking for romance, an American who every so often has something approaching an accent I judged to have been English. She shares a flat with Pam, who is secretary to Lt. Cmdr. Ewen Montagu. When the plan is underway, implementing it requires credible details and items. One is judged to be a love letter from the dead man's sweetheart. Lucy (who refers to herself early in the film as a librarian) is falling in love with a pilot. Pam is assigned the task of writing a love letter, but has trouble with it (being somewhat sexless herself, she remarks to Lucy, after warning her not to fall in love with a pilot, that if she were to fall in love, she would allow it to happen during the war, to avoid pain and to save her full effort and strength for the war effort). Pining for her pilot lover, Lucy dictates a letter full of longing, pathos, unfulfilled love, fear, and passion.

The body is released from a submarine, wearing a Mae West (also called so in the book), his briefcase attached to a chain that wraps around his waist and down and out of his sleeve. It is found by Spanish in Huelva. That is described  in the book: Huelva is far enough away from Gibraltar that it is trusted the body will not be delivered to the British there. It is also known by the British that there is a German operative in the Huelva region who is likely to get documents from the washed-up British man.

The Germans (called Jerry by the British officers) are impressed, but need confirmation that the dead man (Michael Martin) was really whom he seemed to be. An operative is dispatched to ascertain the truth; he is played by Stephen Boyd. He lets a room in a boarding house, using an Irish brogue to charm the landlady. Once inside, he sets up his telegraph machine, communicates with his people, and sets out to find proof.

He goes to a tailor shop and inquires about his "friend" having bought shirts there. That is inconclusive. He winds up in the flat of the two women, and waits. Pam comes home, and he speaks with her, not knowing her role or job. Eventually Lucy shows up, after having received a phone call from her Joe's pilot mate, telling her of his demise.

In the flat Patrick O'Reilly asks questions, including some about Michael Martin. In her grief Lucy speaks of the pain of romance and of loss, and O'Reilly is convinced that Michael martin was a real man. Before leaving he gives the women his address. He goes back to his flat and telegraphs his contacts including saying that if they do not hear back from him in an hour then they can assume that Michael Martin wasn't real.

The Brits go after O'Reilly, but before actually arresting him Montagu calls the commander and reasons with him: O'Reilly wants to be arrested, so let us not do so. When they do not arrest him, O'Reilly telegraphs his contacts that martin was real.

Surviving in the City, Against All Odds

Kidder, Tracy. (2009). Strength in what remains : a journey of remembrance and forgetting. New York : Random House.



Mr. Kidder’s subject, Deogratias, whom he calls Deo, arrives at Kennedy Airport with $200 in his pocket. He speaks no English and knows no one. Lost, homeless and haunted by nightmares, he squats in abandoned Harlem tenements and later sleeps in Central Park. He becomes suicidal.

“Better, he thought, to be in Burundi, if Burundi were at peace, than to live on the wrong, impoverished planet in New York,” Mr. Kidder writes. “This place made you feel like you were simply not a human being.”

Mr. Kidder’s book is a story about survival, about perseverance and sometimes uncanny luck in the face of hell on earth. Deo is a Tutsi who managed to escape the vicious civil war between his people and the Hutus in Burundi and neighboring Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. Being a Tutsi was a distinct liability; the Hutus were at this point killing Tutsis indiscriminately.

It is just as notably about profound human kindness. It is about the selfless strangers who helped Deo in America, who gave him places to live, helped him find jobs and ultimately helped him attend Columbia University and Dartmouth Medical School.

Tracy Kidder


If “Strength in What Remains” is slightly less immediate than those earlier books, it may be because, paradoxically, Mr. Kidder is too fine a writer. Like John McPhee, whom he has acknowledged as an influence, Mr. Kidder makes a fetish of the nonfiction writer’s craft, generally for the better but occasionally not. His clear, perfectly buffed, shyly self-satisfied sentences can be curiously distancing.

I'm going to look at his books.

Mr. Kidder doesn’t push too far, doesn’t linger on horror and insanity. You feel safe in his hands; he’s not going to push your face into the mire or insert atonal notes into his score. Thus you occasionally long for a pricklier, less predictable writer, a Paul Theroux or a William T. Vollmann. A writer acquainted with his own dark impulses, that is, who can let out, when needed, a sickening howl.

Excerpt: ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
The Sunday Book Review on ‘Strength in What Remains’ (August 30, 2009)
Paper Cuts Blog: Questions for Tracy Kidder (August 28, 2009)


A clinic in Burundi opened by Deo, the subject of Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains.”

A Buffett farming in Africa

Thurow, Roger and Scott Kilman. (2009).
Enough: why the world's poorest starve in an age of plenty. New York: PublicAffairs.












Howard Buffett teaches farmers in a Burundi cornfield. Agriculture is the main livelihood for citizens of the country, one of the world’s poorest.











June 29, 2009 - Philanthropy

A Buffett Turns to Farming in Africa

Warren’s son Howard has quietly become a player in the fight against global hunger

By SCOTT KILMAN and ROGER THUROW 

After a meeting with farmers in Fufuo, Ghana, Howard Buffett stood up to shake hands, African style. He extended his right arm, marked with a faint scar from a cheetah bite, and then launched into a rapid combination of finger snapping and palm slapping.

The middle child of Warren Buffett is an unassuming Illinois soybean and corn farmer. But for the past four years, he has played a behind-the-scenes role in the global war against hunger. Given a small portion of his father’s fortune for philanthropy, he spends much of the year traveling through Africa, experimenting with ideas for helping poor farmers produce enough crops to feed their families and so lessen the continent’s food shortage. His foundation is spending about $38 million this year on projects such as developing a disease-resistant sweet potato, encouraging poachers to switch to farming, providing micro credits, and helping farmers market their crops to United Nations’ hunger-relief programs. Probably his most ambitious project under way would give African corn breeders royalty-free access to Monsanto’s biotechnology for drought-tolerant corn.

His father’s very public decision in 2006 to bequeath no more than a fraction of his fortune, then worth $40 billion, to his children’s foundations has put Howard on his unusual course. The famous stock picker opposes big inheritances; they coddle the second generation and concentrate wealth, he argues. Each of his children receives an annual donation of Berkshire Hathaway shares, which shrinks in size each year, for their charitable foundations. The sage of Omaha has never been to Africa and, of his son’s arduous lifestyle, says, “I would hate it.”

When Howard, 54 years old, was 23 he cashed in stock from his grandfather to buy a bulldozer to start an excavating business. What he really wanted to do was farm, but he didn’t have the money. His father agreed to buy a modest Nebraska farm for his son, but in classic Buffett fashion, he charged him market-rate rent.

Howard became chairman of a state agency aimed at encouraging the construction of ethanol plants in Nebraska and then won election to the Board of Commissioners that governs the county in which Omaha sits. Howard’s grasp of farm politics, as well as his last name, put him on the radar of Dwayne Andreas, the cagey chairman and chief executive of grain-processing behemoth Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. in Decatur, Ill.

Mr. Buffett joined ADM’s board and became a corporate vice president, posts that gave him a global perspective on agriculture as he began buying land for an Illinois farm. Mr. Buffett left ADM in 1995, upset about a price-fixing scandal at the company and joined a nearby manufacturer of steel grain bins called GSI Group. Soon he was off to South Africa to drum up business from its large grain farmers.

He traces his interest in fighting global hunger to his hobby taking photographs on those business trips in Africa. As he was photographing migrating wildebeest and zebra in 2000 from a rickety plane, trying to position his camera for a picture, he saw scars on the ground where poor farmers had used fire to clear desperately needed land. Mr. Buffett realized that he couldn’t protect Africa’s environment without first fighting its food shortage.

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Melissa L. Hickox

Howard Buffett teaches farmers in a Burundi cornfield. Agriculture is the main livelihood for citizens of the country, one of the world’s poorest.

“I’m watching this thinking, ‘They are going to destroy the last forest,’” Mr. Buffett later recalled. “It was an epiphany for me: The hungry can’t worry about conservation. I realized you can’t save the environment unless you give people a chance to feed themselves better.”

The death of his mother, Susan Buffett, from a stroke in 2004 helped to crystallize his focus on the poor. It also gave him the means to make a difference. The Buffett children had always expected that their mother’s foundation would oversee the distribution of their parents’ vast wealth. She had long supported medical research, education, abortion rights and nuclear disarmament, and had encouraged her children to be socially conscious. She brought young Howard along when she went into Omaha’s housing projects to help a Cub Scout troop.

Her death at 72 forced Warren Buffett to confront how to start giving away his fortune. He settled on directing the bulk of his Berkshire Hathaway shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He trusted Mr. Gates, a Berkshire Hathaway board member and friend who played bridge with him. What’s more, the Gates Foundation had the infrastructure to handle a gift of such size.

On top of this, Warren Buffett promised each of his three children’s foundations annual gifts of stock initially worth $50 million. For Howard, the gift meant that the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, from which he doesn’t draw a salary, could increase its annual spending at least eightfold.

It was ordained that Howard and his two siblings would see the family fortune given away rather than have it to spend on themselves. His father, who lives far below his means in a modest Omaha house, has argued publicly that it does little good for society when children inherit great wealth by virtue of an “ovarian lottery.” The multiplier effect is far more powerful, the argument goes, if fortunes are used to help the less fortunate rather than to suckle a bloodline of trust funders. Warren Buffett went to Congress in November 2007 to argue in favor of the estate tax, saying it counters an unhealthy concentration of wealth. Of his middle child, he says, “he’s got my money and his mother’s heart.”

With one foot in American farming and the other in Africa, Mr. Buffett has developed his vision for African farming. With oil prices so volatile, he thinks few farmers in African villages should use the same type of high-tech, mechanized farming he practices in Illinois. A typical farm in the Midwestern U.S.—of the sort Mr. Buffett owns—is an investment of millions of dollars.

“It takes a lot of fuel to run my equipment. And for inorganic fertilizer. And pesticides. How can that be the right answer for someone who has the opportunity to start from the beginning?” Mr. Buffett says.

While many economists and anti-hunger advocates call for a Green Revolution in Africa, Mr. Buffett shuns the phrase because it refers to the agricultural boom that swept Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern seeds as well as hefty applications of fertilizer and water caused Asia’s wheat and rice crops to rapidly swell.

Mr. Buffett believes that getting Africa to feed itself is a lot more complicated. Africa’s geography is so diverse that its population has to depend on far more than two crops for its calories. Many of Africa’s farmers are poorer, less educated and even more isolated from infrastructure such as roads and irrigation systems than Asia’s were.

So Mr. Buffett is looking for ways to help African farmers increase their harvests without increasing their costs, thus his interest in developing plants that resist disease and drought.

To lobby for Africa aid, Mr. Buffett invites politicians, scientists, entertainers, and corporate executives to squeeze into the cab of his Deere tractor in Illinois, where he has their full attention as he navigates corn and soybean fields with global positioning technology. One of the few people he has let drive his harvesting combine, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is Shakira, the pop singer from Colombia who has an education foundation.

It’s hard to measure the impact of Howard Buffett’s foundation, something Mr. Buffett himself acknowledges. He does most of the work finding and visiting projects. He employs eight people, mostly in administrative roles. One man is based in South Africa overseeing research on Mr. Buffett’s 6,000 acres of farmland outside Johannesburg. It was there on a wildlife preserve that he set up that a cheetah bit him.

Mr. Buffett figures his foundation’s projects have helped about 1.5 million Africans so far. He hopes that the crop-breeding work he is supporting will eventually help millions more African farmers feed their families.

His father, for one, counsels patience. “If you bring your heart to something it makes a big difference,” says Warren Buffett. “And he has time. He didn’t have to wait until he was 80 years old.”

For the first time since the early 1970s, the prevalence of hunger in the world is climbing. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, 15% of the world’s population is hungry, up from 13% at the middle of this decade. FAO economists are predicting that the number of chronically hungry people will climb this year to 1.02 billion, up 11.5% from 2008.

As soon as next year the world could resume consuming more grain than its farmers produce. That global trend earlier this decade is what drained world grain stockpiles, setting the stage for last year’s price shocks. The fear is that food prices will leap when the world economy recovers.

“I am more discouraged than I was when I started. The problems are so huge,” Mr. Buffett says.

In February 2007, his SUV pulled into Fufuo, a village in central Ghana. Accompanied by Ghanaian agronomist Kofi Boa, he hurried into a large cinder-block building where 30 farmers had been waiting, sheltered from the sun.

Back home, Mr. Buffett owned 800 acres of corn and soybeans and a fleet of the most modern John Deere implements. Now, he hoped to learn something from farmers who scratched the dirt with sticks and machetes. Mr. Boa, the agronomist, had been coaching them to replace slash-and-burn farming with a practice he called “no-till.”

In many African villages, poor farmers—who are often women—had traditionally made room for their crops by chopping down the brush and trees on a few acres of tribal land. It is hard on the farmer and the environment. The land is laid bare to erosion. As the soil deteriorates, farmers work harder and harder to produce food until they have to move on to another spot, repeating the cycle.

Mr. Boa told Fufuo’s farmers to disturb the ground as little as possible. Other than poking holes in the dirt to plant their seeds, the ground was not to be hoed or vegetation burned. Organic residue—such as leaves, stalks, and roots—was valuable, not trash. Fufuo’s farmers were taught to make room for their seeds shortly before planting time by squirting the competing vegetation with Chinese-made weed killer dispensed from backpacks.

The village quickly discovered that no-till plots yielded bigger crops with far less labor. The mulch acts as a sponge when it rains, banking water for crops, and then breaks down into plant food. The time the farmers saved by no longer hoeing weeds and cutting brush was time for money-making endeavors. Some started to raise cocoa trees, a crop prized by Ghana’s government for its export earnings; others began to raise chickens, feeding them with their surplus grain.

“How many seeds of corn do you plant on a hectare?” asked Mr. Buffett as he peered through thick eyeglasses and jotted down answers in a notebook. “Can you farm more land now?” he continued. “How much corn did you harvest?”

Further convinced he should support the no-till training of farmers, Mr. Buffett left. After his SUV drove off, swallowed in red dust, the farmers were told that their visitor was the son of a billionaire named Warren Buffett.

—Adapted from “ENOUGH: Why the World’s Poorest Starve In an Age of Plenty” by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman. Copyright 2009 by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman. Published by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

The Wonga Coup

The plot came from a novel, but it was a real-life attempt to topple an African regime.

THE WONGA COUP
By Adam Roberts
(PublicAffairs, 303 pages, $26)

Reviewed 26 July 2006

Visitor

Another excellent film. This review captures it well.

Written by Jeff Giles

The Visitor (20th Century Fox)- Director: Tom McCarthy
Starring: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, Hiam Abbass

Movies about lonely, disaffected older men have never exactly been out of vogue in Hollywood, but over the last 15 years or so, they’ve been seemingly more popular than ever – from Paul Newman (1994’s Nobody’s Fool) to Jack Nicholson (2002’s About Schmidt), graying actors have courted critical greatness by starring in dramas with varying degrees of uplift. (Bill Murray is the standard-bearer of this subgenre, thanks to his roles in Lost in Translation and Broken Flowers.)

Now, veteran character actor Richard Jenkins – one of those “that guy” actors you’ve seen in everything from The Witches of Eastwick to Step Brothers – has found his own lonely older guy project: The Visitor, a small, graceful drama written and directed by Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent). It won some festival awards and earned a stack of glowing reviews during its original limited run, and now, thanks to a Best Actor nomination for Jenkins in this year’s Academy Awards, it’s enjoying a whole new round of buzz – and so is Jenkins.

The attention is deserved – after a lifetime of supporting roles, Jenkins finally gets his chance to truly shine in The Visitor, and he knocks it out of the park, using all of the film’s 104 minutes to peel away his character’s layers with a quiet performance that’s almost Newmanesque in its finely shaded understatement. Jenkins plays Connecticut college professor Walter Vale, who begins the picture as a bit of a douche – in the opening scenes, he fires his piano teacher and curtly dismisses a student’s pleas for mercy – and such a wet noodle that by the time he’s strong-armed into traveling to New York to present a paper he co-authored in name only, you may be wondering how and why he deserves his own movie.

It’s when he reaches the city, of course, that things start to get interesting. Upon entering his New York apartment – which he’s had for 25 years, but rarely visits – Vale is alarmed to discover a woman (Danai Gurira) in his tub and her enraged boyfriend (Haaz Sleiman) thundering down the hallway, demanding to know what he’s doing there. As he quickly discovers, the couple has been subletting his apartment from a person named Ivan, despite the fact that Walter doesn’t know Ivan, and Ivan has no right to make the arrangement. Rather than allow his surprise tenants to wander the streets looking for a new place to live, Walter allows them to stay – a decision that, if you know your movies, you will not be surprised to discover has life-altering effects.

At first, Walter’s decision to share his apartment seems like one of those nutty, spur-of-the-moment plot twists that screenwriters live and die by, but that’s just McCarthy being cagey; as the viewer slowly discovers, Walter had a different kind of life before the movie started, and he has reasons for doing this that he doesn’t fully understand until later in the film. He’s most immediately won over by Tarek, the djembe-playing boyfriend – and thanks to Sleiman’s wonderfully charming performance, it’s easy for the audience to understand why. Walter is fascinated by Tarek’s drumming, and they bond over lessons; with each strike of the djembe, Walter thaws, until, in a wonderful sequence, he finds himself joining a drum circle in the park. It’s a scene that works on several levels, whether you choose to interpret it as a metaphor for the community-building power of music or simply a turning point for the movie.

Of course, chance encounters can be good or bad – something McCarthy reminds us in The Visitor’s second act, when Walter is called upon to help Tarek out of a sudden, terrible predicament. The ways he answers this call, and the completion of his transformation from closed circuit to human conduit, are best left out of this review; suffice it to say The Visitor is a beautifully tender drama built out of small, warm moments, with some profound things to say about the possibilities buried in every stranger you pass on the street. It’s sort of the anti-Death Wish, offering a glimpse of city life that’s rife with hope and brotherhood. Jenkins has said he’s waited his entire professional career to be a part of something like The Visitor, and after watching the film, you’ll be as glad as he is that the opportunity presented itself.

The DVD comes with a small assortment of bonus features, including an “inside look” (4:35) that offers a surface glimpse of the film that’ll probably be most useful for someone who hasn’t seen the movie. More enjoyable is “Playing the Djembe,” a look at the instrument’s profound importance in the film – starting with McCarthy’s lessons, and continuing through Sleiman’s experiences playing with a New York jazz combo during scenes for the film. There’s also an entertaining commentary track from McCarthy and Jenkins, and a few deleted scenes that don’t add much to the film. Not a ton of extra content, but the studio had to leave something for the inevitable double-disc special edition, right?

Tarek is arrested by undercover police for allegedly jumping the turnstile, except that his drum got stuck as he was negotiating the turnstile after having swiped his Metrocard first for Walter, then for himself. He pleads his case, but the cops aren't interested. Walter pleads, too, asserting that it must be some kind of mistake, but is told to back away. Tarek is taken to a building that looks more an industrial plant than a jail (later, Walter asserts, "maybe that's the point."). Walter hires a lawyers, trudges out to Queens daily, and deepens his relationship with Tarek.

Extending his character's persona, Jenkins holds a letter that Tarek's girlfriend Zainab has written him against the glass separating them, and looks away, as if assuring Tarek that he is not reading the letter, and, indeed, adding a dose of privacy. Slowly, Walter is shown to be emerging from his protective cocoon: he cares for Tarek, and wishes he could end this nightmare. But he can not, and the lawyer he has hired can not, either.

Tarek's mother (Mouna, played with understated sadness by Hiam Abbass, an Israeli Arab actress). shows up unannounced at Walter's apartment, looking for her son (who had told Walter he did not want her to know about his arrest). Walter invites her in, and tells her of Tarek's arrest. He offers her Tarek's room as a place to stay, and she diffidently accepts. Walter takes Mouna to meet Zainab at the street market where Zainab sells her crafts and jewelry. "She's very black," Mouna remarks. The race differences (Tarek is Syrian, Zainab Senegalese, Walter Caucasian) are touched on, allowed to be seen, a courageous and correct act; race is not often exposed to sunlight.

The lawyer Walter hired tells him and Mouna that before 9/11 such a case as Tarek's would've been cut and dry, disposed of easily; but that after 9/11 such cases had become very difficult. He asks Mouna about documents the government would have sent, and she denies having received them. As it turns out, she had received them, ignored them, then forgotten about them, a critical mistake that helps contribute to Tarek being deported.

Having found out about Tarek's fate, Walter and Mouna head back to the apartment. A night or two before Walter had taken Mouna to a Broadway show ("Phantom of the Opera") and out to dinner, where she ordered a glass of wine (the first one she's had; Walter had offered her wine before, and she had never joined him). That night Mouna tells Walter she is heading back to Syria, to be there when Tarek arrives. The romance that has been developing under the surface runs into a brick wall of sad reality. They say good night, and head off to separate rooms, and separate beds. Some time later Mouna knocks on Walter's bedroom door, enters, and slides into his bed, back first, emphasizing her reluctance even then to do so. They talk, and she confesses about the document.

Next morning they go to the airport, hug goodbye, and as they are parting Walter says he does not want her to leave. Out of family loyalty, he does go. In a cutaway, we see Walter carrying a djembe on his shoulder; he enters a subway station (a Broadway Lafayette sign is seen in the background), sits, and begins to drum.

Excellent film. Really good acting.

Blood Diamond

Excellent film. Serves as a metaphor for the ages-long tragedy of war in Africa; kudos to DiCaprio, a big Hollywood star, for making such a film. This film should be a wakeup call to white American and European audiences, especially, to the ravages of endless fighting, ceaseless killing, and perpetual damage to an entire continent and its peoples. I was moved to tears by the tragedy of a family torn asunder by violence they had nothing to do with. In Tim Butcher book, Blood River, I read about Belgian colonialists chopping off hands of Congolese as a means of exercising control and instilling terror; in this film that fact is spoken by a character, but one so minor that it could well get past most people. It is shown graphically.

DiCaprio are Djimon Hounsou are magnificent in their roles. Leo actually manages to pull off an accent quite well (his character calls it Rhodesian). Djimon is flawless in showing pathos, bravery, defiance, perseverance. Jennifer Connelly's performance is mediocre, and her character is a two-dimensional stereotype. Too bad; she can act well. Overall, a stirring, disturbing, excellent film.

Fascinating account - epic solo journey

Traversa. (2007). Fran Sandham. New York: Duckworth Overlook.