'The Visitor' delivers a breath of fresh air

By Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on May 23, 2008

The Visitor is nothing like the feel-good movie suggested by the previews, although it's understandable that you might expect a light-hearted film: It tells the story of an aging white man who gets a new lease on life through his unexpected association with an immigrant couple.

In fact, you do fear it is going to go that way at first, but it leads us somewhere else entirely. By the second quarter of the movie or so, I forgot my apprehensions and became deeply involved in this thoughtful examination of both aging and immigration.

Directed by Tom McCarthy, whose first film was "The Station Agent," "The Visitor" reminded me more of Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt" than any other movie in its overall tone of melancholy mixed with wistfulness and a glimmer of modest contentment.

Richard Jenkins, who plays the central figure, Walter Vale, deserves credit for making "The Visitor" as powerful as it is. Perhaps best known as the father who dies in the first episode of HBO's "Six Feet Under" but haunts the characters ever after, Jenkins' Walter is an extremely sympathetic character despite being terminally prim with a few less-than-believable traits.

That Walter would take up drumming, for instance, is a bit of a stretch, but Jenkins pulls it off - as well he must since it is central to the plot. Extrapolating from the previews, you might think Walter learns to play drums like a cool musician from some exotic country, then starts hanging around the hippest parties picking up beautiful women. That's not what happens at all.

Instead, Walter, a burnt-out economics professor, meets some upstanding people who happen to be in the country illegally and gets a taste of the medicine he administered to wayward students, when he tries to navigate Immigration Services.

Being as shy and possibly depressed as he is, Walter would likely have not met these immigrants, at all, if they hadn't been living in his own apartment in New York City, a place he has stopped visiting, we take it, since his wife, a concert pianist, died. But when he is forced to return to the city to deliver a paper he didn't even write, he finds Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira) living in his apartment. They're paying rent - to some unseen, unscrupulous guy named Ivan, who has tricked them into believing it's his apartment.

Tarek and Zainab are the nicest couple you would ever want to meet - maybe too nice for believability's sake, but not ruinously so. Tarek, who is from Syria, plays the drum, and Zainab of Senegal makes and sells jewelry in outdoor markets. The fact they are not in the United States legally becomes obvious to Walter after it's too late and Tarek has been spirited away to a nearby detention center. How nerve-racking and heart-wrenching, not to mention downright scary, the immigration system is for all concerned eventually dawns on Walter.

Hiam Abbass is particularly moving as Tarek's mother Mouna, who insists on being close to Tarek, wherever he is, if he is in trouble.

"The Visitor" ends in one of the least obvious ways it might have, taking us, along with Walter, on a journey somewhere unexpected. Just when we were burnt out with paint-by-numbers, manipulative feel-good movies, this film provides a refreshing respite.

Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.