The Visitor

The Visitor strings together unlikely events in the lives of a professor and his visitors. Remarkably sincere and touching, the unimaginable events feel natural.

Awkward Connecticut economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) has essentially checked out from his job, his personality and his life. Walter is forced by circumstance to return to his abandoned New York City apartment. When he returns he meets Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who have taken up unauthorized residence in his apartment. Tarek and Zainab teach Walter to live again, to come out of his shell and remind him how unfair life can be.

Writer and director Thomas McCarthy wrote all of the characters in The Visitor with almost contradictory personality attributes which gives them each a complex humanity.

McCarthy wrote Walter Vale painfully dull and bumbling but it was Richard Jenkins who also makes Walter charming and heart breaking. In nearly every setting, Jenkins both makes the audience scrunch their faces at Walter's social inadequacies while simultaneously bringing out our Florence Nightingale instincts. As Walter changes in the course The Visitor, Jenkins keeps the essential qualities of Walter but changes him in surprising ways.

The supporting cast isn't any less remarkable in The Visitor. There is a master of life, a vision of unabashed sadness and an embodiment of sensual motherly warmth. Haaz Sleiman, who plays Tarek, is (damn foxy) full of life as Tarek. His esprit fills Tarek, the audience, the other characters and actors with such vitality. Danai Jekesai Guria plays Zainab, Tarek's girlfriend. So much of Zainab is forlorn despondent dejection. Rich with beautiful hardness and unnaturally attractive pain, Danai Jekesai Guria made Zainab so hard to watch but impossible to pull your eyes away from. Hiam Abbass plays Mouna, Tarek's mother. Her fear is palpable but she never loses her intangible sensuality.

The most remarkable part of The Visitor is the way it organically shows the way life can change un-expectantly, unfairly and without warning and does it with real, raw emotion. Just when you think you've figured out what the movie is about, you slapped with a new reality. It is frightening, timely and angering. Even the ending, which is not the typical movie ending, is emotive in a subtle and realistic way. I was not overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the movie, I was perfectly whelmed; a task indeed.

The pacing is the one complaint I have with The Visitor. The editing could have been much better. There are beautiful scenes sometimes drawn out to boredom. Scenes that were the actors' timing is slightly off are only highlighted by the shoddy editing. The Visitor is an artsy movie but Tom McArdle checked out completely in a few of the scenes.

Slow bits aside, The Visitor is a rewarding film with rich characters, beautiful acting and complexities that might make those people who are quick to tears, cry.

A genuinely unexpected gem. As he proved with his first film as a director and screenwriter, 2003's "The Station Agent", Thomas McCarthy knows how to convey the fine line between solitude and loneliness in his characters' lives with an emotional preciseness that doesn't call attention to itself. It's not surprising that McCarthy is an actor because he's able to capture the very subtle nuances in behavior in actors that make his work feel like Edward Hopper paintings come to life. As a result, you pay attention to a simple gesture, a passing glance, a resigned sigh. This time, his protagonist is Walter Vale, an enervated, middle-aged economics professor at a Connecticut college. Widowed and wholly lacking in professional motivation, he begrudgingly accepts an assignment to go to an academic conference at NYU and present a paper on globalization he really didn't write.

Coming back to a Greenwich Village flat he rarely uses, he is surprised to find a couple living there. Not squatters but unfortunate victims of a rental scam, they turn out to be illegal aliens, a Syrian percussionist named Tarek and his girlfriend Zainab, a Senegalese who makes and sells handcrafted jewelry. As withdrawn from life as Walter is, he slowly finds himself bonding with the couple and lets them stay indefinitely. Zainab is slow to trust Walter, but Tarek and Walter become close over a mutual love of African drums. As his wife was a famous classical pianist, Walter had been futilely attempting to find musical inspiration since her death. However, just as this charming tale of world harmony plays out, it comes back to harsh reality when Tarek is arrested and taken to a detention center in Queens for deportation. What McCarthy does from this point forward is show how sadly restrictive the post-9/11 environment has made immigration laws and how there is no recourse to be found under the constant surveillance of a bureaucratic government protected by the latitude of the Patriot Act.

None of this is hit over our heads with a politically motivated sledgehammer. Far from such polemics, the story singularly focuses on Walter's emergence of purpose in helping Tarek. When Tarek's mother Mouna arrives from Detroit, McCarthy adeptly shows how Walter's closeness to Tarek translates without condition to her. It's a moving transformation of a formerly lonely man finding intimacy in the most unlikely situation. In a once-in-a-lifetime role, character actor Richard Jenkins brings heart and soul to Walter in the most economical manner. Best known as the ghostly father in HBO's "Six Feet Under", he has worked steadily in films for three decades, his most memorable turn being the gay FBI agent high on heroin in David O. Russell's "Flirting with Disaster". With his constant look of resignation on the verge of revelation, Jenkins gives a wondrously poignant, often dryly funny performance that deepens as the story evolves.

Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira are terrifically winning as Tarek and Zainab, and they make their bonding with Walter more than credible. As Mouna, Hiam Abbass is no stranger to persevering maternal roles as she brought her particular brand of strength to Hany-Abu Assad's controversial "Palestine Now" and Eran Riklis' family dramedy, "The Syrian Bride". In response to Walter's fumbling overtures, she affectingly conveys her character's resolute stillness and gradual blossoming. There are brief cameos by comic actor Richard Kind as Walter's unctuous neighbor, Deborah Rush as a wealthy and ignorant customer of Zainab's, and Broadway legend Marian Seldes as Walter's failed piano teacher. At first, I thought the film's title was blandly generic in describing those who are here from other lands, but I realize now that the visitor is really Walter as he discovers his soul. The last shot is memorable and captures the fury of his passion with potent force. Strongly recommended.

It's only about twice a decade that I run across a movie that really impresses me. It's usually an obscure film that I entered with no expectations -- but left blown away by its cinematic achievement.

I just saw such a film tonight. "The Visitor" A small independent production with zero-advertising. Made by Tom McCarthy whose prior film, "The Station Agent," was an imperfect, character-absorbed drama.

The star of this movie is an actor (Richard Jenkins) whom you'll recognize from his numerous roles as minor-characters, most notably the dead-patriarch in "Six Feet Under." All of the other actors are completely unknown, but notably talented.

The appeal of this film is its story. An aged, listless academic, whose wife died earlier, floats through his uninteresting life until something happens to jar him. What happens next is unexpected, interesting and poignant. It would ruin the story if I told it to you, so you'll have to trust me. Suffice it to say it's a story of rebirth.

Like most of my favorite films, it has comedy, pathos, surprises, authenticity and a philosophical examination of what it means to be human. In short, everything, even politics.

And the presentation is skillfully-crafted. McCarthy demonstrates what was good about his prior work without dragging it down with what was bad about that work.

See it.

Thomas McCarthy's 2nd film after the wonderful "Station Agent" is equally good, if not better. I can't recommend Richard Jenkins' performance any higher here. He plays a widowed professor who is drifting through life rather aimlessly until he visits his New York apartment and finds there are two people squatting there. I won't give away anything else, except to say that it'll be a shame if this film flies under the radar. Jenkins is a character actor that everyone recognizes, but that few of us know. Here he occupies the first third of the film practically alone, and reminds us in moments of the Jack Nicholson character from "About Schmidt" with his dry humor that is on display for his crabby piano teacher.

Don't you just love watching an actor up there alone who keeps you spellbound in a subtle way? That's how this movie starts, and gradually we come to meet the couple in Jenkins' apartment, and the mother of one of them. The movie flows economically and with much care, but by the end it creeps up on us and makes us feel glad along the way as well as making us pause and reflect on the state of our world.

Lovely, lovely movie.

In Connecticut, the widower and lonely Professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) has a boring life teaching for one class only in the college and trying to learn how to play piano despite not having the necessary musical talent. Walter is assigned to attend a conference about Global Policy and Development in the New York University and give a lecture about a paper that he is coauthor. When he arrives in his apartment in New York, he finds the Syrian musician Tarek Khalil (Haaz Sleiman) and the Senegalese street vendor Zainab (Danai Gurira) living there. He sympathizes with the situation of the illegal immigrants and invites the couple to stay with him. Tarek invites him to go to his gig in the Jules Live Jazz and Walter is fascinated with his African drum; then Tarek offers to teach Walter to play the drum. However, after an incident in the subway, Tarek is arrested by the police and sent to a detention center of immigrants. Walter hires a lawyer to defend Tarek and out of the blue, Tarek's mother Mouna Khalil (Hiam Abbass) appears in Walter's apartment coming from Michigan; he invites her to stay in Tarek's room and while trying to release Tarek, Walter and Mouna get close to each other and he finds a reason to live an exciting life again.

"The Visitor" is a touching and realistic tale of friendship and self- discovery in a world of intolerance. It is ironic to see the poster "Immigrants – The Strength of America" and sad to see the arrogance of the officers responsible for the security. The story is supported by an excellent screenplay; a simple and effective direction of Thomas McCarthy, who is also the writer; and magnificent performances of the cast. The always awesome Richard Jenkins, who plays a middle-aged intellectual that lives a senseless life after the death of his wife that finds a reason to live with music, the elegant Hiam Abbass that helps Walter to find the meaning of life together with her son, performed by the unknown Haaz Sleiman have an amazing work. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Visitante" ("The Visitor")