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The Visitor (2007/I)

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27 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
Sensitive & Thoughtful Film, 19 September 2007

Author: movie_jay from Toronto, Canada

Thomas McCarthy's 2nd film after the wonderful "Station Agent" is equally good, if not better. I can't recommend Richard Jenkins' performance any higher here. He plays a widowed professor who is drifting through life rather aimlessly until he visits his New York apartment and finds there are two people squatting there. I won't give away anything else, except to say that it'll be a shame if this film flies under the radar. Jenkins is a character actor that everyone recognizes, but that few of us know. Here he occupies the first third of the film practically alone, and reminds us in moments of the Jack Nicholson character from "About Schmidt" with his dry humor that is on display for his crabby piano teacher.

Don't you just love watching an actor up there alone who keeps you spellbound in a subtle way? That's how this movie starts, and gradually we come to meet the couple in Jenkins' apartment, and the mother of one of them. The movie flows economically and with much care, but by the end it creeps up on us and makes us feel glad along the way as well as making us pause and reflect on the state of our world.

Lovely, lovely movie.

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28 out of 39 people found the following comment useful :-
Another Gem from Tom McCarthy, 24 January 2008

Author: wmjaho from Park City

I absolutely loved The Station Agent in Sundance 2003, so I put Tom McCarthy's newest movie, The Visitor, at the top of my list. Boy was that a good call. This is a lovely, gentle and touching film that works on many levels. Richard Jenkins gives a perfectly understated performance. A veteran character actor (I counted 75 roles since 1985, that's about five per year!), it's the first time I've seen him as a lead. And the rest of the cast is terrific as well, including Hiam Abbass, Haaz Sleiman and Danai Jekesai Gurira.

Walter Vale (Jenkins) is a widower who teaches economics at a Connecticut university. No longer motivated by his work, he lives alone, struggling to find passion and meaning in his life. In New York to present a paper at a conference, he goes to the apartment that he has kept since his wife was alive (but hasn't visited for some time) only to discover a young couple living there, having been duped by an acquaintance who "rented" it to them. Despite their great cultural difference, Walter befriends Tarek (Sleiman), a Syrian citizen and drummer, and gradually builds a friendship with Esi (Gurira), his girlfriend from Senegal. One day, when returning from Central Park with Walter, Tarek gets arrested for jumping a stuck subway turnstile, despite the fact that he had paid. The police discover he does not have legal papers and transfer him to an immigrant detention center in Queens. Feeling responsible for and connected to Tarek, Walter stays in New York to help and support him. Not hearing from her son, Tarek's mother arrives from Michigan to find out why, and she and Walter support one another while they attempt to free Tarek.

The movie is a painful illustration of the inhumanity of the post-9/11 immigration policies and procedures. At the same time, it beautifully illuminates the wonders of friendship, kindness, reaching out, exploring life and finding meaning in a challenging world. Despite it's gentle pace, the story glides by, establishing characters that we care deeply about. The Visitor has a lot of heart. The audience reaction was effusive, and gave McCarthy the longest standing ovation I have heard at Sundance in some time. Scheduled to be released April 11 in New York, definitely put this one on your list.

Sundance Moment: McCarthy talked about Participant Media, which helped fund the production (and also Syriana, Charlie Wilson's War, An Inconvenient Truth and other cause-related movies). Visit their website at www.takepart.com to explore meaningful causes and how you can become informed and get involved. McCarthy also said that he wrote the screenplay with Jenkins and Abbass in mind, tailoring their roles to the two of them.

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17 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Charming, character driven drama, 2 April 2008

Author: movieman430 from United States

Thomas McCarthy's second film, after the charming Station Agent, is a quiet, hard look at several different aspects of humanity. The Visitor centers on Walter Vale, masterfully portrayed by Richard Jenkins. A solemn economics teacher, he spends his time pretending to write on his book and learn piano. Walter finds himself in New York on business and runs into two illegal immigrants, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira who were tricked into renting his apartment. Tarek and Walter strike up an unusual friendship when Tarek begins to teach Walter how to play the drums. This is interrupted by Tarek's arrest and detention while it is decided whether he will be deported or not. Soon Walter is joined by Tarek's mother Mouna.

The Visitor is a wonderful piece that brings together some of the best performances I have seen this year. McCarthy disarms us with wry humor, quiet wit, and a meditative pace and before we know it we've found ourselves immersed. When the credits have rolled, however, it's not so much the plot that stays with us as the characters. The most perplexing and fascinating character is Walter Vale. The transformation undergone by his character is done perfectly, the changes are noticeable but not intrusive. Tarek and Zainab who have only a handful of scenes together, manage to share incredible chemistry. Hiam Abbass, as Tarek's mother, deepens the connection between the characters, almost filling in the cracks to complete a whole.

At first glance, the Visitor seems political in nature. Thomas McCarthy has actually said that was not true, the deportation aspect of the film actually came into the script later in the process. The Visitor, instead of political aspirations, merely seeks to show us that anyone can change your life and that change is all around us and is indeed a good thing.

In the end, Thomas McCarthy succeeds in bringing capturing the humor, tragedy, and change of the human experience in his new film. Brought to life by incredibly stirring performances, particularly Richard Jenkins, the Visitor is the most emotionally powerful film to light up the big screen in a while.

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11 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
A sad awakening, 23 April 2008

Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

Much of the art of the writer-director and cast of 'The Visitor' resides in the fact that nobody gets in the way of the important story the film tells, which is essentially a parable. What might happen, it seems to ask, if average white middle-class Americans became truly sensitive to the horrific plight of many foreigners in this county? The strength of The Visitor' is that the strong feelings it awakens lead to some serious thoughts.

Our average guy is an intelligent professional who's tellingly cut off from the rest of the world, even what's immediately around him. Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a widowed professor like Dennis Quaid's character in the much inferior 'Smart People'--not an egocentric bore like the latter, however, but an essentially decent person. Walter is impeccably dressed, polite to everyone, but reserved and distant. Walter, as he admits later, is just "pretending." He's dried up; has ceased to be fully alive. He lives alone in Connecticut where he teaches, and is detached toward students and colleagues alike. Remarkably, since he still seems to have a reputation, he has not revised his course on global economics for fifteen years. He's published books and claims he's finishing another but isn't really working on anything. He dabbles with piano lessons, in honor of his late wife, a celebrated pianist, but that isn't going anywhere; he keeps firing teachers.

Walter has recently agreed to be listed as co-author of a paper another teacher wrote. When the real author can't read the paper at an NYU conference, he has to go. That takes him back to a New York apartment he's left unoccupied for some time--and when he enters it and discovers its been illegally rented to a young Syrian man and his Senegalese girlfriend, his life is changed.

The uninvited occupants are Tarik Khalil (Haaz Sleiman), a drummer who's in a small jazz band and also likes to jam in the park, and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who makes original jewelry she sells on the street. They immediately gather their possessions to move out, but Walter takes pity on them and lets them stay provisionally. Obviously Walter could use some excitement. The couple are focused, energetic, alive, radiant with hope--all Walter has ceased to be. Tarik is extremely outgoing, warm, friendly to Walter. His drumming immediately engages Walter and before long the uptight professor is trying his hand at it. Zainab however is cautious and fearful. For good reason, as it turns out, since neither she nor Tarik is in this country legally.

What happens later is heart-wrenching not only for the young couple but for Walter, and perhaps for viewers, some of whom may identify with the American professor, others with the two outsiders, who have so much to offer yet aren't wanted here. Walter becomes deeply involved, to the extent of a burgeoning relationship with Tarik's widowed mother Mouna (Hiam Abbas), and he does the best he can, but he ends up angry and helpless.

The US has only 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners and the highest incarceration rate of any country. This is part of the story told here, because many would-be immigrants in the US are in long-term open-ended detention, another scandal and horror perpetrated in America of which 'The Visitor' provides a haunting, vivid glimpse. The film conveys a clear sense of the insensitivity and blind arbitrariness of a US immigration system that grinds up lives rapidly and heedlessly behind unmarked walls.

Todd McCarthy's first film, 'The Station Agent,' was an accomplished and well-received indie artifact, quirky and cute. It was pitch-perfect in its way, but a little fey. This time he's done something completely different: 'The Visitor' by clear implication takes a pretty strong, if generalized, stand on immigration issues; speaks out not for an oddball few but for multitudes of ordinary people, and does so forcefully. Yet it's not preachy. Its narrative follows a course that's seemingly obvious but keeps grabbing you just the same.

There are many immigration stories, often lengthy, intricate, and epic. This one has the simplicity and occasional sketchiness of a short story. There is admirable restraint in that. What's also significantly different from many citizenship sagas is the way 'The Visitor' draws an American of privilege into the picture as more than a mere observer. This has a kind of Brechtian effect for the American viewer. This isn't "us." But suppose it were "us"? It was"us"--was our ancestors, our parents or grandparents. How many degrees of separation are we hiding behind?

One main way the film avoids interfering with its story is that the experienced Richard Jenkins and the three other principal actors, Haaz Sleiman, Hiam Abbas, and Danai Jekesai Gurira never overdo or underplay. They just seem like they're being themselves, which is an actor's triumph but also a director's. And McCarthy is also the writer. The whole film is an admirable illustration of the maxim Less is more. McCarthy and his cast make it all look easy--and that's not easy.

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10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
McCarthy's Small Film Shows Passion Can Be Found in the Most Unexpected Places, 21 April 2008

Author: Ed Uyeshima from San Francisco, CA, USA

A genuinely unexpected gem. As he proved with his first film as a director and screenwriter, 2003's "The Station Agent", Thomas McCarthy knows how to convey the fine line between solitude and loneliness in his characters' lives with an emotional preciseness that doesn't call attention to itself. It's not surprising that McCarthy is an actor because he's able to capture the very subtle nuances in behavior in actors that make his work feel like Edward Hopper paintings come to life. As a result, you pay attention to a simple gesture, a passing glance, a resigned sigh. This time, his protagonist is Walter Vale, an enervated, middle-aged economics professor at a Connecticut college. Widowed and wholly lacking in professional motivation, he begrudgingly accepts an assignment to go to an academic conference at NYU and present a paper on globalization he really didn't write.

Coming back to a Greenwich Village flat he rarely uses, he is surprised to find a couple living there. Not squatters but unfortunate victims of a rental scam, they turn out to be illegal aliens, a Syrian percussionist named Tarek and his girlfriend Zainab, a Senegalese who makes and sells handcrafted jewelry. As withdrawn from life as Walter is, he slowly finds himself bonding with the couple and lets them stay indefinitely. Zainab is slow to trust Walter, but Tarek and Walter become close over a mutual love of African drums. As his wife was a famous classical pianist, Walter had been futilely attempting to find musical inspiration since her death. However, just as this charming tale of world harmony plays out, it comes back to harsh reality when Tarek is arrested and taken to a detention center in Queens for deportation. What McCarthy does from this point forward is show how sadly restrictive the post-9/11 environment has made immigration laws and how there is no recourse to be found under the constant surveillance of a bureaucratic government protected by the latitude of the Patriot Act.

None of this is hit over our heads with a politically motivated sledgehammer. Far from such polemics, the story singularly focuses on Walter's emergence of purpose in helping Tarek. When Tarek's mother Mouna arrives from Detroit, McCarthy adeptly shows how Walter's closeness to Tarek translates without condition to her. It's a moving transformation of a formerly lonely man finding intimacy in the most unlikely situation. In a once-in-a-lifetime role, character actor Richard Jenkins brings heart and soul to Walter in the most economical manner. Best known as the ghostly father in HBO's "Six Feet Under", he has worked steadily in films for three decades, his most memorable turn being the gay FBI agent high on heroin in David O. Russell's "Flirting with Disaster". With his constant look of resignation on the verge of revelation, Jenkins gives a wondrously poignant, often dryly funny performance that deepens as the story evolves.

Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira are terrifically winning as Tarek and Zainab, and they make their bonding with Walter more than credible. As Mouna, Hiam Abbass is no stranger to persevering maternal roles as she brought her particular brand of strength to Hany-Abu Assad's controversial "Palestine Now" and Eran Riklis' family dramedy, "The Syrian Bride". In response to Walter's fumbling overtures, she affectingly conveys her character's resolute stillness and gradual blossoming. There are brief cameos by comic actor Richard Kind as Walter's unctuous neighbor, Deborah Rush as a wealthy and ignorant customer of Zainab's, and Broadway legend Marian Seldes as Walter's failed piano teacher. At first, I thought the film's title was blandly generic in describing those who are here from other lands, but I realize now that the visitor is really Walter as he discovers his soul. The last shot is memorable and captures the fury of his passion with potent force. Strongly recommended.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
The Visitor, 2 May 2008

Author: laraemeadows from United States

The Visitor strings together unlikely events in the lives of a professor and his visitors. Remarkably sincere and touching, the unimaginable events feel natural.

Awkward Connecticut economics professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) has essentially checked out from his job, his personality and his life. Walter is forced by circumstance to return to his abandoned New York City apartment. When he returns he meets Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who have taken up unauthorized residence in his apartment. Tarek and Zainab teach Walter to live again, to come out of his shell and remind him how unfair life can be.

Writer and director Thomas McCarthy wrote all of the characters in The Visitor with almost contradictory personality attributes which gives them each a complex humanity.

McCarthy wrote Walter Vale painfully dull and bumbling but it was Richard Jenkins who also makes Walter charming and heart breaking. In nearly every setting, Jenkins both makes the audience scrunch their faces at Walter's social inadequacies while simultaneously bringing out our Florence Nightingale instincts. As Walter changes in the course The Visitor, Jenkins keeps the essential qualities of Walter but changes him in surprising ways.

The supporting cast isn't any less remarkable in The Visitor. There is a master of life, a vision of unabashed sadness and an embodiment of sensual motherly warmth. Haaz Sleiman, who plays Tarek, is (damn foxy) full of life as Tarek. His esprit fills Tarek, the audience, the other characters and actors with such vitality. Danai Jekesai Guria plays Zainab, Tarek's girlfriend. So much of Zainab is forlorn despondent dejection. Rich with beautiful hardness and unnaturally attractive pain, Danai Jekesai Guria made Zainab so hard to watch but impossible to pull your eyes away from. Hiam Abbass plays Mouna, Tarek's mother. Her fear is palpable but she never loses her intangible sensuality.

The most remarkable part of The Visitor is the way it organically shows the way life can change un-expectantly, unfairly and without warning and does it with real, raw emotion. Just when you think you've figured out what the movie is about, you slapped with a new reality. It is frightening, timely and angering. Even the ending, which is not the typical movie ending, is emotive in a subtle and realistic way. I was not overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the movie, I was perfectly whelmed; a task indeed.

The pacing is the one complaint I have with The Visitor. The editing could have been much better. There are beautiful scenes sometimes drawn out to boredom. Scenes that were the actors' timing is slightly off are only highlighted by the shoddy editing. The Visitor is an artsy movie but Tom McArdle checked out completely in a few of the scenes.

Slow bits aside, The Visitor is a rewarding film with rich characters, beautiful acting and complexities that might make those people who are quick to tears, cry.

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
You know a movie is good when you don't want it to end., 10 April 2008

Author: marc-262 from San Diego, CA

I saw this film at Sundance (along with about twenty others). It was the only film I screened that ended with a standing ovation. The accolade was well-deserved. Richard Jenkins completely inhabits the professor, Walter Vale, unmoored by the death of his wife. Drifting, without purpose, grinding through his days, he thinks his life is over -- he is just taking up space. But when that space is invaded by a vibrant couple, Walter has an epiphany.

Richard Jenkins is not the only actor of note in this cast. Everyone is pitch-perfect. But particularly be on the lookout for Hiam Abbass. Every time she is on the screen is a delight. This is one of those rare films that you really do not want to end.

It would be easy to pigeon-hole this film as a topical drama dealing with an uncaring government system. But this film transcends all that. Instead it is a heartfelt film about what happens when people -- with all their desires and difficulties -- bump into one another to express the best part of their humanity. If this is the kind of movie you would like to see made more frequently in Hollywood, vote with your wallet this weekend, then go again and take some friends.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
gets better the more you think over it; subtle, convincing human tragedy on a small scale, 13 May 2008

Author: Filmjack3 from United States

Thomas McCarthy's two films, The Station Agent and The Visitor, are both concerned with a person not in his element of social space, of being disconnected from other people and not really based on him wanting it on himself, but somehow finds people to connect with without any force and gets wrapped up in their lives because he is, basically, a good person. Peter Dinklage played the former title character, and now we have Richard Jenkins (a veteran character we all know and admire but never really peg who he is most of the time he shows up) as a middle aged college professor who's wife has passed on and doesn't have any passion for teaching or writing his next book.

He takes begrudgingly a task to give a speech on a paper he only co-wrote in name in New York City, and finds in his old apartment a couple (Syrian and African played by Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) who have been living there for a couple of months. Somehow a bond grows between them, mostly between the two men over playing on the drum. Then something happens, tragically, which changes everything, but it's not what you might think at first.

It would appear that the Visitor is a film about the underrated horror of the problems of being an illegal in America, and the processes of the government basically not giving a damn about most of the people, and most of whom haven't done a thing. While McCarthy nears the film towards preachy ground in these bits, they're few and far between. His great strength is in making value out of good people forced into circumstances that make them show how good they really are. Jenkins could just leave the guy behind in that jail, but there's something about his plight that affects him, not simply for the obvious but because of a connection on a pure level (through, most crucially, music) that goes beyond class or race or whatever.

It's a very precise moral story, but it needs the performances to carry it. Luckily, McCarthy is an actor's director, and Jenkins is able to be subtle about it and able to convey frustration when required very naturally. He depicts a loneliness to the character that is cracked through his ties to these new characters, including Tarek's mother, and all of the actors around him are up to 'snuff' too (especially Haaz Sleiman as the good-natured man who got screwed over by a faulty immigration process). They help make such a small-scale story worth telling, and it's a true sleeper that demands some more attention, at some point or another, which might be on video or on the inevitable screenings on the IFC channel.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Excellent, Inspiring Film!, 12 May 2008

Author: Luis Lopez (innommable@gmail.com) from Chicago, United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

This film, whose central theme is immigration in the U.S., is an excellent film! It is a poetic story about the reawakening of a sense of justice in the consciousness of one American, via the personal consequences of immoral U.S. immigration policies. In a way, it also serves as an allegory for the desire to reawaken that same sense of justice in all Americans.

It would have been heavy-handed and trite (the current film, Under The Same Moon, comes to mind) if this film was merely a damning portrayal of immigration policies. This film is not didactic in that way. It will not patronize you, nor attempt to make you feel guilty. Instead, it will uplift and inspire you, as all good art should.

It begins with what seems like a very long portrayal of an economics professor's moribund and depressing life in a college town in Connecticut. The great thing about this film's beginning is that it contains a few funny scenes, which serve as cheerful markers in his dreary days. The tone of the film changes once he is forced to deliver a lecture at an academic function in New York City.

The trailer will reveal that when the professor gets to his apartment in Manhattan, which he has not visited for years, he meets a young straight couple living there, Tarek and Zainab. The trailer will not tell you they are illegally renting the apartment because they have been deceived into believing it belongs to someone else. However, the trailer goes on to reveal that after his unpleasant first meeting with them, the professor allows them to stay. It also reveals that he begins taking African drum lessons from Tarek, who makes a living as a musician. Then, in a misunderstanding, Tarek is arrested, and because he resides in the U.S. illegally, is taken to a holding facility. I will not give away the rest of the story because I urge you to see it and discover it for yourself!

I am one of those zealous film watchers that will stay awake and attentive throughout a film, even if it is bad, in order to tell just why it is so bad. My high threshold comes from years of not having an integrated set of values that would have allowed me to know when movies were no good, and consequently watching them as if they were. Whatever the case, I can be so overly attentive that when watching movies on DVD, I have been known to rewind, even if I only miss something from blinking.

This film effortlessly engaged me, and it will engage you too, but if what I've said so far is not enough to entice you to see it, there is something else in it that just may. There is a scene that is tastefully and skillfully slipped into the narrative, where we get to see Tarek in his briefs! I must admit, even though I'd been giving the film my undivided attention, when that scene came on, I perked right up!

I also am hyper-sensitive to any sort of patronizing or heavy-handedness in films. For that reason, the professor's attraction to the African drum music and the scenes in which he is learning to play the drum made me a little uncomfortable. The problem was that the professor's deceased wife had been a brilliant pianist, and his attempts to connect to his old life with her, by taking piano lessons, are complete failures. In the scenes where it becomes apparent that he likes the African drum, my overly-analytic mind started to wonder whether this was some attempt to symbolically pit Western music against the more primitivistic African drum music, and make a statement about the latter's superiority. This, as I found out later, was not the case.

The drumming could have easily been replaced by cooking, or dancing, or any creative activity particular to Tarek's culture. It was simply the way the economics professor was to become personally invested in the "Other" culture, and the way the consequences of immoral immigration policies would become personal consequences for him.

One thing this brilliant movie demonstrates is that in order to give any issue the attention, prominence, and sense of urgency that it deserves, it must be portrayed in a way that makes it relevant and urgent to individuals. When he is being held, Tarek says, through tears, "I just want to play my music, what's so wrong about that?" It was how he made a living and it was also his life. In an instant, and without good reason (as if there could be a good reason to take someone's honest livelihood away), it was taken away from him by force.

Later, the economics professor yells, "This isn't fair!" But it wasn't just his voice I heard. His voice was an echo of my own voice, and the voice of anyone to whom these issues have become their own personal issues. It is the voice of anyone with friends and loved ones who have been stripped of their basic human right to live, by the immoral, fear laden policies of our own government. It is the voice of any objective human being that is able to clearly see the injustice of the matter. When you watch this film, you may also hear your own voice.

Great performances all around, a beautifully told story, and an inspiring message!

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
A heartbreaking and heartwarming movie, 28 April 2008

Author: dedoc1 from Canada

This was an incredible heartwarming and heart-breaking movie. Its power lies in its simplicity. In some ways its is a coming of age movie about a middle-aged professor coming to terms with his life and allowing himself to finally be who he is. Or perhaps a re-birthing movie in which, having died psychologically and spiritually, he emerges from his cocoon.

A series of random events coincide to bring about a life-changing event (isn't that always the case?). The unfolding of the story occurs at a slow and steady (but never boring) pace that is in perfect keeping with the tone of the movie. It operates at many levels at once, presenting a comedy, drama, social statement and lesson, magnificently intertwined. Without much fanfare viewers are carried along quietly and unknowingly by the movie before realizing they are totally caught up in the depth and humanity of the story. The events opens up the main character as well as the audience's awareness of what is happening all around us in everyday life, of which few are aware and most of us prefer not to know about.

What makes the movie what it is is the fact that it is not necessarily designed to make a specific point or manipulate the emotions of the audience or to provide an answer or ending to make folks feel one way or another. However these factors do emerge in the minds of viewers. This is why the movie have such an impact - a simple story, very well told, with no hidden agendas. Movie making at its best.

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