Film Review

Writer/director Tom McCarthy, who won a BAFTA award for his freshman screenplay The Station Agent, has found success once again with his sophomore release, The Visitor. Visitor centers on the character of Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), an archetype for an aging man who has lost his passion in life. He has been destroyed by the passing away of his wife, which has enveloped his sexuality; even his vocation is undesirable, as he loses the will to write and becomes frustrated with having taught the same class for 20 years. He tries to take piano lessons to evoke the memory of his spouse, who recorded her own music, but even the music he plays is devoid of emotion.

Walter is sent by his college to a developing nations conference at New York University to present a paper that he co-authored by name only. When he arrives to his apartment, he is taken by surprise by Tarek and his partner Zainab, who have been living there for two months as victims of a real estate scam. A kind man, Walter allows the two to stay in his second bedroom while they look for an apartment. Even Zainab is disgusted by the brute man that Walter has become in spite of his hospitality. But Tarek takes to Walter, giving him zimbae lessons. At first, Walter is too uptight to practice the drum, a reflection of his current lifestyle. Pretty soon, Tarek has him playing in Central Park and practicing in his underwear - a complete character reversal highlighted along with the lightening of Oliver Bokelberg's dark, unpolished cinematography.

There wouldn't be much of a film left if an external tragedy didn't hit, however. As soon as things seem on the upswing for Walter and his new friends, Tarek is stopped in the subway, being wrongly accused of skipping out on paying his fare. That leads the police to realize that he is an illegal immigrant, and he is transported to Queens to be held for deportation. This leads Walter to hire an immigration lawyer and quickly find his life consumed by freeing his new friends, taking leave from his university.

Whether McCarthy meant it to be or not, The Visitor is clearly a message movie. As Walter drives along the highway from Connecticut to New York at the beginning of the film, a banner reading, "Support our troops and bring them home" is zoomed in on. McCarthy attacks the harsh realities of living in a post-Sept. 11 world, with no abandon. While the film could be marred by such heavy dialogue as Tarek's "You just can't take people away like that, do you hear me," McCarthy avoids this fine line. The key to his success: As an unconventional screenwriter, McCarthy has developed his screenplay around his characters rather than around his plot. In his performance, Jenkins is so believable that the audience is almost never drawn out of the film. Additionally, McCarthy brilliantly never takes the perspective of Walter away from the story, as he does not allow his audience to see Tarek's captivity beyond the visitor's box that he sits in.

The film also wonderfully points out the ironies in the United States' stance on immigration. When Tarek's mom Mouna arrives (the delectable Hiam Abbass), Walter and Zainab take her to see the Statue of Liberty. While Zainab and Tarek have been there many times, Walter, a U.S. citizen who owns property in New York, has never seen it. McCarthy shows U.S. citizens' lack of understanding of their freedom in a global context. When a woman purchases a bracelet from Zainab on the side of the street, she asks Zainab where she is from. Zainab reveals he is from Senegal, of which the middle-aged white shopper quickly gushes about her trip to Cape Town. Cape Town, a noted tourist destination, is 8,000 miles away. The immigrants captured in the film are more aware of their world than the Americans are, and they are prouder to be in America. "I miss Damascus. The smells. But this is my home now," Mouna says.

Another BAFTA award this time around? Probably not. It is almost impossible for a film of this nature to avoid caving in on itself. What is more important here are the courageous issues that McCarthy explores, issues that will hopefully be brought to the forefront of the zoo that American politics have become. B-