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Give Me Your Tired, Yearning to Breathe Free
By bukkhead | May 19, 2008
FILM REVIEW: ‘THE VISITOR’
Written and Directed by Thomas McCarthy
Rated PG-13
108 mins.
Walter is a middle aged, middle-class widower, a professor of economics at a college in Connecticut. The only thing interesting about him is that he wants to play the piano. He enjoys classical music and a glass of wine. He is a simple and plain as they come. But The Visitor is not a film about how boring Walter is, or depressed, for that matter. It can’t be said that Walter is stuck in a rut, if only because he has no aspirations to do anything else, no desire or motivation to move outside his carbon-copied routines.
But, it turns out, even existence-by-the-numbers has a synergy, in that Walter is more or less forced to present a paper in New York at an Economics conference. Going back to the apartment he still owns, he finds squatters living there, a Syrian jambe player named Tarek and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab. Soon Walter and Tarek are friends, and Walter begins learning the jambe. Walter’s world is not so much turned upside-down as it is opened wide. He is finally given passage to desire.
Character actor Richard Jenkins is one of those veterans that everyone recognizes, but who’s name almost no one can remember. His half-anonymity is perfect for the role, as you don’t know what to expect him to do, though you can rest assured that he has the experience to play his part. And Jenkins handles himself expertly: too often, famous actors can’t act their way past their own fame, while Jenkins easily is Walter, without any compromise on the side of the audience. Indeed, although it’s a very simple role, this was enough for Jenkins to have won the Method Fest Best Actor award for the part.
Television actor Thomas McCarthy writes and directs, and this second film has the same grace and languid style as his first effort, multiple-award winning The Station Agent. In this film, as his last, his writing is as much about what he doesn’t force on the experienced movie goer: Walter is laconic, taciturn. In his new experiences with new friends, he does not effuse appreciation, become overly impassioned, or even have much reaction other than polite gratitude. It is in this way that his previous plainness is show to be not a sign of a boring life, but just a simple character trait.
McCarthy’s New York is a melting pot of people and cultures, not the glamorous or violent New York of other movies, but the day-to-day New York of subways, lunch in the park, 5th floor walk-ups. Scenes are backdropped by the iconography of Americana: the United States Flag, the Statue of Liberty… as this is a movie immigration in our post 9-11 country, immigrants and the American dream do not blend together as much as they sit juxtaposed, each awaiting the other for chance to visit. And while the obvious expectation is that Walter welcomes his foreign visitors, we come to understands in the end that it’s Walter who is The Visitor.
(This review was printed in the Newport Mercury.)
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