Movie break: Transcending grief with a beat, bridging worlds in a walkup: The Visitor (2008)

Not to seem like a raving Tom McCarthy fanatic, but his film The Visitor deserves a little more comment than I gave it in my entry on The Station Agent (February 2).

This is the quietest of his three films, about a widowed economics professor, Walter Vale, who teaches at a Connecticut college, heading to New York City to present a paper on behalf of a colleague, at NYU. He has had an apartment in the East Village, where he goes for, apparently, the first time since his wife died. He finds the apartment has been fraudulently leased to two young people, with whom he at first has an encounter that shocks them all: a young Syrian man named Tariq Kalil, played by Haaz Sleiman (who, unlike his accented character, sounds very American in DVD commentary), and a young woman from Senegal, Zenab, played by Danai Gurira, a recent NYU graduate. (These characters’ grounds for bonding, aside from “blind” love, are that both are Muslim; and, as it happens, both speak French as well as English.)

At first, after this unmarried couple packs their things and leaves on the ordinary assumption they had to go, Walter, usually reserved and showing his most Dionysian side in a glass of red wine he so often nurses, is moved enough to allow the couple to stay at his apartment with him, until they find somewhere else to live. This leads to a rapid thawing of relations, especially between Walter and Tariq, who plays the djembe, a West African drum that today seems more popular than the congas among those (amateurs and others) who opt to play such instruments. Tariq’s livelihood stems from playing the djembe in local clubs with other musicians.

Walter, who has struggled to learn classical piano (his wife was an accomplished pianist), is offered to be taught the more viscerally approached djembe by the enthusiastic Tariq. While Zenab is at first consistently reserved and even leery about Walter, Tariq and Walter develop a strong fellowship in teacher–student relations over learning the djembe, even participating in a Central Park drum circle session on a sunny autumn day (a rousing, fun scene). Their friendship is solid enough that Walter is suitably shocked (when the story lurches into a graver mode) when Tariq is arrested by New York police in the subway after they mistakenly think he has jumped the turnstile, and find he doesn’t have proper proof of citizenship.

Zenab, who has earned her living by selling homemade jewelry as a streetside vendor, is appalled to learn of the arrest, and in a revelation that heralds her own bonding with Walter, avers that she and Tariq are illegal aliens. Zenab fears Tariq will be deported. Walter, apparently readily enough based on warmth within his grown friendship with these two, pays for an attorney to help rescue Tariq from possible deportation. Much of the rest of the story includes scenes with Walter checking in with Tariq (on either side of a glass wall) in a prison-like holding center for possible deportation cases. I won’t spoil by revealing much more of what follows.

Though this story may seem (at its start)  to be implausible in certain minor respects if not simply novel, its most credible—and creditable—side is the emotional level on which all these people make common cause. An additional plotline starts when Tariq’s mother, played by Hiam Abbass (who also appeared in Spielberg’s Munich [2005]), appears in New York after her son has not been in touch for days. She and Walter then bond, initially over the predicament concerning Tariq, and then on a more visceral level. All this emotional connectedness among ostensibly foreign-to-each-other people follows a certain trademark Tom McCarthy pattern: a study of how emotional ties sprout and develop due to an initial accidental association, nurtured by the ordinary will to help out that the predicament inspires, so that the emotional ties end up defining the relationships more validly than anything else, and shape the plot as time goes on.

Jenkins shines the most with a subtle performance

Most notably, Walter is played by Richard Jenkins, a 60-ish veteran of TV and movies who, with his receding hair, longish jaw, and pockmarked skin, looks like nothing so much as a favorite high school social studies teacher. Jenkins has played supporting roles for years—this was his first lead role in a movie. (He has enough actorly resources to have appeared in a number of Coen brothers movies.) He received an Oscar nomination for best actor as a result of his role in The Visitor. This was enough for Leonard Maltin’s evaluation of the movie to change noticeably between editions of his compendium that appeared before and after the 2009 Oscars: his initial rating wasn’t too high, but bumped up after Jenkins’ Oscar nomination.

And perhaps the biggest surprise is that this nomination wasn’t due to any flashy acting: Jenkins plays what would definitely not attract a very young, commotion-eager audience: a quiet, bereft man who has grown unchallenged and alienated in his work, and goes through his reserved motions at his college, but “comes out of his shell” with his helping Tariq and Zenab, and later making common cause with Tariq’s mother. So when Walter takes an uncharacteristic emotional stand near the movie’s end, we might conclude that the real “visitor” in this movie is the emotional growth of a mature, quiet man who has been “visited” by the occasional shocks that life presents, amid new friends with whom he has healthily built bridges.

We know this is a movie written before the 2008 financial shocks, but in the wake of the social stress and exhaustion resulting from the Iraq war: this story is about quiet decency as it can show its face among accidental neighbors, when the only cost to helping out people with whom we ordinarily wouldn’t have been much involved is losing our blockages (grown out of self-absorption) to being moved by fellows’ plights.