The Visitor is not to be missed — a delicate, tender humanistic drama that juggles organic humor, emotional emancipation and unforeseen catastrophe with masterful skill and dexterity. It addresses the timely issues of post-9/11 immigration and incarceration, but avoids polemics by keeping the focus solely on the human cost of our government’s policies.
Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a New England academic who has been sleepwalking through life ever since the death of his concert pianist wife. He holds anything remotely emotional at arm’s length and pretends to be busy teaching classes he’s had on autopilot for decades and writing a book he has no intention of ever starting. When he is obliged to attend a conference in New York City, Walter returns to the Manhattan apartment he and his wife used to frequent and still keeps for reasons only his subconscious knows. He is surprised to discover squatters there — young, illegal Muslim immigrants who were deceived into thinking they were subletting the apartment. Walter invites the couple to stay until they manage to find someplace else to go.
Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is from Syria and Zainab (Danai Gurira) is from Senegal. She makes jewelry and he plays the djembe in various clubs and on street corners. The proximity to their youth and vibrancy begins to slowly thaw Walter’s cold, wounded heart. Unable to wrap his middle-aged mind around the piano that he so desperately wants to learn as a means of keeping himself tethered to his late wife, Walter instead finds himself enchanted by Tarek’s drums. The unfamiliar rhythms of a foreign land is the last music Walter expected to embrace, but the exotic melodies, like the exotic melody-maker himself is the key to his finding his way again.
When the most insignificant misunderstanding lands Tarek in the hands of immigration officials intent on deporting him back to the Middle East, Walter finds his priorities realigned, his ambivalence toward his country’s foreign policies challenged and the unexpected warmth of a most unorthodox love.
Jenkins commands our attention with what is, remarkably, a still, passive performance. One of my favorite character actors, Jenkins takes a well-deserved lead turn as the down-in-the-mouth sad sack for whom we never once lose affection. The joyous Haaz Sleiman glows like a human blowtorch in every scene. We don’t realize how brightly until, following his incarceration, we watch that fire sputter and nearly die. And Hiam Abbass, as Tarek’s mother Mouna, is the embodiment of regal beauty and statuesque grace under pressure.
Director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) likes stories of people who choose isolation rather than embrace the human connection they so desperately need. In The Visitor, his sophomore feature, he crafts a powerful, life-affirming film, empty of maudlin sentimentality but rich in genuine humanity and warmth.
The dictionary defines harmony as “the combination of simultaneously sounded musical notes to produce chords and chord progressions having a pleasing effect.” The beautiful The Visitor uses music as a metaphor about blending seemingly disparate voices to form a chorus that is at once beautiful and powerful. Make no mistake, the film is a commentary about America’s current attitudes toward terrorism, immigration and xenophobia, but it handles those potentially poisonous topics with such exquisite subtly and restraint that it is hard to see how anyone could find offense or accuse the film of heavy-handedness. Instead, The Visitor simply invites us to consider the plight of “the other.”
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.