The Visitor: Movie Review, DVD Review (2008)

The new Tom McCarthy movie, the beautifully measured “The Visitor,” is about a man at a cross-roads, with the most appealing road to take--at least at this point in his life--appearing to be the one that leads to the top of the highest cliff. And then off it.

His name is Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins, never better), he’s a widower, and as the movie opens, he’s no one you’d particularly want to befriend, unless of course you meet each other at a glum bar and thus shared similar gray outlooks on life.

Everything about Walter suggests a life in which the air has been let out of the room. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t talk much. His career as an economics professor seems more of a burden to him than it does a source of energy and creativity.

And yet Walter, well--he’s complicated. At one moment, he’s unnecessarily rude to his students. In another, he is the student, in this case a man on the downside of life who is struggling to learn the piano from an elderly woman he ultimately fires because he believes she’s failing at her job.

“How many teachers have you had before me?” she asks.

“Four,” he says.

Her knowing gaze might as well be ours.

The film, which McCarthy (“The Station Agent”) based on his own script, is a surprise of restraint and calm in the wake of summer’s more aggressive howlers. In that way alone, it’s a welcome reprieve, offering audiences a moment to get to know real people again, and perhaps to feel a connection to them that was difficult to do in, say, such films as “The House Bunny” or “Death Race.”

The film narrows its focus when a colleague recommends that Walter travel to New York City to attend a conference that will highlight a paper he co-authored. Walter’s initial reaction is to resist. But when it’s suggested to him that he has little choice in the matter, he gathers himself together and leaves for an apartment he has kept in the city for years.

It’s when he arrives that he’s shocked into a new kind of existence. In his apartment are two illegal aliens. There’s Tarek (Haaz Sleiman, terrific), a Muslim from Syria, and his girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira), a Muslim from Senegal. Each rented his apartment via a mysterious third party named Ivan and thus were under the impression that renting it was legit.

It wasn’t. A scuffle ensues, misunderstandings are aired, and then something expected happens (at least to those in the movie)--a relationship is formed between the three. While Zainab initially wants little to do with Walter, Tarek, a gifted, enormously likable musician who plays African drums in Manhattan parks and nightclubs, is drawn to him, particularly when Walter expresses interest in learning how to play those drums.

While on the surface it might seem that a movie about a man who finds his lost rhythm via the vehicle of another culture is predictable and cliched, it certainly could have been in the wrong hands. But McCarthy has the right touch.

Running beneath the surface of his movie are the sort of political undertones that could have come off as canned, particularly since they deal with the tensions surroundings Muslims in New York City in the wake of 9/11. Instead, since the movie is more about Walter’s rebirth into the real world, those undercurrents don’t feel forced or preachy, but honest and real. What McCarthy mines is something emotional and moving, which proves especially true when the plot complicates to include Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass), whose presence in the film deepens it in ways that won’t be revealed here, but which helps to make “The Visitor” one of the best independent films of the year.

Grade: A-