Unwelcome Visitor

McCarthy unquestionably means well, but he has made one of those incredibly naive movies that gives liberals — Hollywood liberals especially — a bad name, and which does more to regress the sociopolitical discourse than advance it. "I was struck by how little I knew about the region," he says in the movie's press notes, remarking on his trip to the Middle East as part of a U.S. cultural-outreach program. "With all the news and the headlines and the drama, we can forget that there are human beings on both sides of this." Is McCarthy really this dense, or does he think he's the enlightened one and we are in need of his counsel? I hope the former, but, on the basis of The Visitor, I fear the latter.