REVIEW: The Visitor

By Philip Martin

Tarek's girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira) frets about their future in the United States in The Visitor.

ADVERSTISMENT

LITTLE ROCK — The Visitor is precisely the sort of film Hollywood has abandoned, a literate and low-key character study of an ordinary man in depressingly average straits. It honors measured gestures and suggests that small acts of kindness can be heroic and life-changing.

It acknowledges minor truths without defaulting to conventional devices of uplift - it allows us to believe in an unhappy ending if we wish.

Movie

The Visitor

91

Rating: PG-13

Length: 1 hour, 43 minutes

More information

Tom McCarthy, the actor turned filmmaker who offered the similarly subtle The Station Agent in 2003 (he also played a corrupt reporter in the final season of HBO's The Wire), wrote this film especially for Richard Jenkins, a 60-year-old character actor whose face is more recognizable than his name. And watching the finished product, it's difficult to think of another performer who could play Walter Vale, a melancholy professor of world economics at the center of the story.

Walter is still in shock from the death of his wife, a classical pianist, some years before. He sleepwalks his way through his single class and office hours at a Connecticut university - ostensibly his schedule has been lightened so that he might work onhis next book, but in reality Walter has given up and is drifting through life on his reputation. He has no heart for work or life - the piano lessons he's taking (perhaps as a way of maintaining a connection to his beloved) are going badly. His teacher commiserates, telling him it's difficult to learn new skills at his age, and offers to buy his instrument.

Walter's routine is disturbed when he's designated to travel to a conference in Manhattan to present a paperby a debilitated (by pregnancy) junior colleague. It seems she'd asked Walter to look over her work and, to bolster her credibility, attach his name to it. Under the circumstances, he can hardly decline the invitation.

So he travels to the city, to his pied-a-terre near Washington Square Park. (He hasn't used the place in years, and we are led to assume that since his wife's death, he's had no use for it.) There he discovers an immigrant couple Tarek and Zainab (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) who have been conned into subletting the space. After some initial confusion, they apologetically agree to leave.

As we might expect, Walter relents and allows them to stay, but not before they've packed up and removed themselves to the street. Walter's decision isn't impulsive but rather an act of volition - a deliberate blow against the comforting numbness of his life. As he watches the huddled pair, their belongings gathered about them in the street, we see something breaking over his face. Walter has tentatively begun to resurface.

Tarek and Zainab are illegal aliens, but both are hard-working, honorable people who contribute to the economy. While Zainab continues to regard Walter with suspicion, the moreoutgoing Tarek notes the professor's interest in his drums and begins to teach Walter to play the djembe.

This relationship indirectly leads to a confrontation with police in the subway, which brings trouble for Tarek. Walter remains in the city to try to help his new friend as the bureaucratic gears of the federal immigration system begin their slow and inexorable grind. Then, missing the daily phone calls from her son, Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) arrives from Detroit, fearing the worst.

While all the performances are quite fine, Jenkins' work is remarkable, especially given that he doesn't seize the role of a lifetime but wears it lightly, maintaining a kind of weary gravity throughout. He is a decent man who is ashamed of his slide into mediocrity and determined to do whatever he can for his new and genuine friends. There's a fierceness that steals into him as he begins to understand the magnitude of the injustice he's facing, a quality of bitter ecstasy that's released in the final frames.

McCarthy has not made a political movie, although it shouldn't be lost on viewers that Walter is a global economist who understands the absurdity of borders. It is ironic that he's a man attempting to open himself up even as his country is closing itself down - that past an age when most of us have calcified our attitudes and ideals, he has begun to hear a different drummer.

MovieStyle, Pages 41, 43 on 05/23/2008