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"The Visitor" -- new film from the creator of "Station Agent", has to be good!

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on April 12, 2008 at 10:13:08

"The Visitor"

Joe Morgenstern, WSJ

[Excerpt]

On the surface, though only on the surface, "The Visitor" bears some resemblances to "Smart People." By taking note of them, I don't mean to diminish this heartfelt and heartening drama by Tom McCarthy, whose previous film was "The Station Agent." To the contrary, the coincidence of both movies opening on the same day shows how an artist -- and Mr. McCarthy is an exceptional one -- can take a familiar character, put him in an intriguing set of circumstances and tell a story that strikes its own deeply resonant chords.

Here, too, the hero, Walter Vale, is a blocked and lovelorn academic -- and, yes, a widower -- who teaches only one economics class at a Connecticut college, obsesses over a book he may never finish writing, and sleepwalks through his life. So much for similarities. The first difference is that Walter (who drives a Volvo) is played with uncompromising austerity by a superb character actor rather than a star -- Richard Jenkins, whom we've seen, among so many other roles, as the taciturn funeral director in "Six Feet Under," and, before that, the comically uptight gay FBI agent in "Flirting With Disaster."

The second difference, which lends the film its distinction, is that a door to a new life opens for Walter when he returns to his Manhattan apartment after a long absence and finds it occupied, through a real estate scam, by illegal immigrants: Tarek, a young musician from Syria, played with humor and passion by Haaz Sleiman, and his girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), an endearing, terribly frightened jewelry maker from Senegal.


Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman in "The Visitor."
Music dominates "The Visitor." It slowly transforms Walter from a buttoned-up fogy, hardly more outgoing than Anthony Hopkins's butler in "The Remains of the Day," to an earnest, if unlikely, drummer who joins other musicians in Central Park, and eventually beats out his own white-guy version of African rhythms in the subway. Music also gives Walter a new family -- not just the universal family of pulsing melody, but the flesh-and-blood family of Tarek, who becomes, comically at first, his surrogate son, and the boy's mother, Mouna (an elegantly nuanced performance by Hiam Abbass), who shows up in New York after Tarek falls afoul of immigration authorities.

"The Station Agent," Tom McCarthy's 2003 debut feature, was a tale of solitude giving way to friendship and love; its hero is a dwarf played with deadpan skill by Peter Dinklage. Mr. McCarthy's new film touches on similar themes while expanding his horizons, and ours. It shows, without sentimentalizing or judging (apart from one unfortunate lapse into soapbox oratory), things we see all too seldom in American movies: the variety and vibrancy of immigrant communities, the insularity of American culture, the fear and paranoia that have colored our feelings about immigration since September 11th. Most of all, though, "The Visitor" tells of renewal through love. Its song is tinged with sadness, but stirring all the same.

• http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120788247820207273.html   (Open in New Window)

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