We didn't intend to watch, back-to-back, two movies that generated Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, but I guess that is how things lined up in our Netflix queue. Sean Penn, of course, won for Milk, in which he plays the title character, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay Californian elected to public office, who along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone was murdered on November 27, 1978, by Dan White, his former colleague on the city's Board of Supervisors. The movie is a contribution to an instantly recognizable genre: biopics wherein the subject is aligned with all that is good and decent and radiates light, whereas the forces with which he must contend are to be despised. You'll feel good about yourself if you're on Milk's side. Penn is said to "inhabit the role," from which I conclude that Milk must have gesticulated oddly while making speeches.
In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins plays an economics professor moping through what's left of his life after his wife dies. I don't know anything about acting, and maybe this is harsh, but how hard can it be to walk stiffly and speak in monotones? For some of us flattened affect comes naturally but for Jenkins it evidently required an Oscar-worthy feat of acting.
Anyway, his character keeps an apartment in New York, and, stopping in after a long absence, he finds a couple occupying the premises. They are brown-black illegals and turn out to be somewhat more friendly than your average squatters. The professor's involvement with them and their problems in post 9/11 America "brings him back to life." The quotes are meant to indicate that I know it's a cliche. I can't think of a fresh way to say it.
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