Movie: The Visitor

We saw "The Visitor" last night at the State theatre. It has the unique feature of having an economist as the main character. I was going to take a pass on this one because of some of the reviews that movies.com led me to but I am glad that Lisa talked me out of it. It is really a story about multiple equilibiria. The main character has become stuck in an unproductive and unhappy (those things not unrelated of course) equilibrium as a result of his wife passing on. He goes to a conference in New York City and stays in his apartment there, only to discover that it has been fraudulently rented to a couple of illegal immigrants, one from Syria and one from Senegal. They conspire in various ways to bring him to a new and better equilibrium, though without an overly sweet ending like you would expect in a Hollywood movie. There are some nice touches - the movie has a pretty accurate depiction of a conference and even mentions the John Bates Clark medal. The one unrealistic thing is that this very quiet and buttoned-down economist is supposed to be a development economist. I certainly do not know any development economists like that. He should be doing a subfield that involves wearing lots of suits and being overly serious, like macro or finance. I think they picked development economics to make some sort of ironic juxtaposition with his visitors from developing countries but I am not sure the sacrifice in realism is worth making. Nonetheless, the movie is recommended.