INFO
The Visitor
3 stars. Directed by Thomas McCarthy. Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman. Rated PG-13. Opens Fri., April 25. At United Artists/Regal Tara.
AUDIO
Writer/director Thomas McCarthy's second film, The Visitor, feels like a companion piece to his 2003 debut, The Station Agent. Both films feature minor characters who have closed themselves down, only to find themselves snapped out of their comas by the real world and its real people.
In a recent review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Smart People, New Yorker critic David Denby astutely noted a trend of independent filmmakers. He dubbed it "the cinema of observation," in which snapshots of character "lead to small revelations about how life works." That doesn't sound too ambitious, and if there are any ambitions in The Visitor, it's in hoping that two stories can coalesce as one. While at first the story suggests a college professor's emotional awakening, the film later takes on greater dimensions when the couple responsible for his wake-up runs into our nation's unnerving post-9/11 xenophobia.
Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a global-economics college professor going through the motions at Connecticut College. He's a widower, chasing after his dead wife's ghost by trying unsuccessfully to learn the piano that she so easily mastered.
Music, like feeling, eludes Walter. He contents himself by recycling his class syllabus by day and gripping his glass of wine like Linus with his security blanket by night.
It's not until he heads to a conference in Manhattan, and his rarely used apartment, that things kick into gear. Walter finds a couple of illegal immigrants – Syrian musician Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira) – renting the unit.
Walter takes pity on their situation, and lets them stay a while. Soon, his juices start to flow, and when he tells Tarek that he teaches global economics, Tarek perks up with, "That's us!" and points to Zainab and himself.
It's in this middle passage that both Jenkins and Sleiman start to shine. Their connection, like Peter Dinklage and Bobby Cannavale in The Station Agent, offers those rare moments in movies when men develop a bond not from war or repressed feelings, but from a genuine warmth toward each other. Sleiman is a bona fide charmer with his infectious smile, unself-conscious laugh and appreciation for life's little joys.
Jenkins, by contrast, provides a doppelgänger for his role as the ghostly father on TV's "Six Feet Under." He goes from haunter to haunted, and Tarek jostles him back to life with his music.
Tarek's a drummer, which sets up the dated metaphor of Third World naturalism liberating uptight Europeanism. But as McCarthy plays it, it's a forgivable cliché. A scene of a drumming circle in a park could make the most hardened rethink "We Are the World"'s faults. It's a poignant moment, with men of all shades of all colors adding their own beats to the circle.
No sooner does Walter seem to be on the mend than The Visitor shifts gears. Tarek is arrested in the subway, hauled off by the cops and sent to a detention center where he faces incarceration. Before we can blink, Tarek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), arrives wanting to know what's going on as Walter is trying to find out. Initially a story about isolation, The Visitor becomes about connection. Walter's and Mouna's relationship replaces the friendship that had developed so brightly between Walter and Tarek. It's as if Tarek had warmed up Walter for the big time.
Not that there's much to spoil in discussing the movie's ending. McCarthy's goals by now feel remote, except to show that maybe we have more inside us than we're willing to admit. As a director, McCarthy seems to eschew the Big Idea, content to offer small moments that he hopes will add up to something a little bit bigger.
He has an eye for detail, though, and the drumming-circle scene is the film's most endearing example. It's also seen in the way Walter dabs Wite-Out over the number 6 in the year "2006" of his syllabus and writes in a 7, or how he brings Mouna down to the building where Tarek is housed. It's a sterile, blocky building with no signs, no barbed wire, not much of anything. "It doesn't look like a detention center," she observes. "I think that's the point," he says.
The Visitor has been adopted by civil liberties groups such as the ACLU as a cause celèbre – a way to protest our nation's immigration policies. (A member of the local chapter helped introduce the film during a recent screening.) McCarthy doesn't seem to be making any grand statements about policy so much as the mentality that we're too isolated for our own good. In his world, isolationism can be a singular choice; rejecting it may help us find our own rhythm.
Hmmm, so that's how life works.
