The Visitor

It's still early, but if it gets to the end of next year and I don't consider The Visitor as one of the best films I've seen in 2008, then it will be an awesome year, because this small low-key film really engaged me, made me think, and moved me.

It was written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who also made The Station Agent, which is very similar in tone and theme--each film is about a person who has closed himself off from people, and through a change of scenery gets drawn into a new world. in The Station Agent it was a dwarf who was fascinated by trains, in The Visitor it is a buttoned-down professor economics who has an ear for music.

Played by Richard Jenkins, Walter Vale is a man going through the motions, almost anesthetized. He has as little to do with other people as possible. When he is pressed to present a paper at a conference in New York, he visits the pied-a-terre he has in the city, which he hasn't been to in years. When he arrives he finds an immigrant couple illegally subletting the place.

I'm reticent on describing more of the plot, because I knew little about it and was thus able to let the story wash over me without preconception. Suffice it to say that the couple, a man from Syria and a woman from Senegal, eventually work their way into Walter's cloistered life. The man, Tarek, in particular, who is a musician, finds comradeship with Walter, who has been attempting to learn piano but instead allows himself to learn Tarek's African drumming.

Eventually the film takes a serious turn, and McCarthy does a little venting about the xenophobic U.S. immigration policy (he includes a pointedly ironic shot of a poster in a detention center that reads "America's Strength is Its Immigrants"--yeah, right) while celebrating diversity. Lou Dobbs will not appreciate this film. At a certain point a love story slyly insinuates itself into the plot, catching the viewer as unaware of it as the characters involved. The title is worth an essay on its own. Each of the main characters is a visitor in some fashion, if that definition is someone who has traveled to a different place.

The acting is, as it was in The Station Agent, reserved and excellent. Jenkins, who has been a character actor in small roles in countless films, is quite good as a mummified man who finds something and someone to care about. He also seems to have done well in picking up drumming. Although his transformation, which happens in only a few days, may seem cinematically convenient, Jenkins sells it. Haaz Sleiman is very good as Tarek, and I really liked Hiam Abbass as Tarek's mother, who is radiant in her sorrow and empathy. This is a very good film.