The chief pleasure of Thomas McCarthy's successor to the much-liked The Station Agent is the performance of richard Jenkins. A character actor of note, he gets a leading role for the first time and was last week awarded the Best Actor prize at the Moscow Film Festival. Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a testy university lecturer whose dried-up emotions get turned inside out by the cruel fate of the illegal immigrants he finds squatting in his flat. he's a widower whose wife was a concert pianist and who loves music, and he gradually learns to become friends with drummer Tarek (haaz Sleiman) and his girl, Zainab (Danai Gurira). Tarek teaches Walter how to drum African-style but then gets sent to jail for a minor offence and is scheduled for deportation.
Tarek's attractive mother comes running anxiously from her legal home in the States and begins to form a tentative relationship with Walter. Walter becomes more determined to help Tarek fight the immigration authorities.
Like The Station Agent, the story is told in a very direct way and sometimes seems a trifle naïve. The immigrants and Tarek's mother are impossibly nice. The authorities are less impossibly cruel.
As for Walter, he is a man who has suddenly found a reason to live again, in the approved hollywood manner. except that this is not a hollywood movie. it looks and feels totally genuine in its anger about the treatment of immigrants and in its sympathy for a man who has found himself again.
All the performances are good but Jenkins, never overplaying and refusing to act for sympathy, could not be better. he even swings the final moment of the film, where he is seen drumming alone in the new York Metro. And he is superb when he finally loses his temper outside the grill of the immigration room where a black American policeman refuses to help and asks him threateningly "to step aside". it's great to see an admired actor proving he is worth a leading role and the international jury in Moscow, of which i was a member, were all moved by his performance even though some found it simplistic. Actually it is not as simple as all that but, like The Station Agent, this is a small film that works well on its own emotional terms and treats a big theme seriously.
The Visitor
Cert: 15
