Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Professor,
Percussionist
(The Visitor, 6/16/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Thomas
McCarthy's The Visitor is a little like its protagonist (Richard
Jenkins): quiet, easy to miss, but ultimately rewarding to get to know.
Indeed, from the faculty of socially-inept academics in recent movies—Jeff
Daniels from The Squid and the Whale, Philip Seymour Hoffman
from The Savages, Dennis Quaid from Smart People, et al.—Jenkins's
Prof. Walter Vale is quite possibly the one guy I'd like to have a coffee
with at some campus java joint ... or maybe even play some squash.
Not that connecting with him would
be easy. He's one of those guys eating lunch alone in the cafeteria,
head buried in a newspaper. He spends much of his professional life
contriving ways to duck his departmental responsibilities. Still smarting
from the death of his pianist wife, he doesn't even show the pathetic
but faintly wistful interest in younger females common at his age. His
compensations lie in accomplishing not-much while he is pretending to
work and to live.
His contented oblivion is punctured
when he is forced to go down to New York to deliver a paper he pretended
to write. Arriving at the Greenwich Village apartment he used to share
with his wife, but hasn't visited in years, he discovers a couple of
strangers living there—a Syrian named Tarik (Haas Sleiman) and
his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). After some initial
awkwardness, and some cultural barriers overcome, Tarik and Walter bond
over a common interest in—of all things—African percussion.
Before long Tarik has Walter skipping sessions at his international
development conference to play in Washington Square Park—the lone
bald, middle-aged white guy in a drum-circle of recent immigrants. Zainab,
who is all business but with a look of perpetual worry on her face,
can only watch their friendship with vague misgivings.
While
this may sound all too earnest a theme to be any fun, I can recommend
it as someone who is ordinarily immune to movie schmaltz. Jenkins, a
character actor best known for his roles as Peter Krause's dead father
in Six Feet Under and the FBI agent on acid in David O. Russell's
Flirting with Disaster, shows a so-far untapped mastery at commanding
the screen while hardly seeming to try. The script by actor/director
McCarthy (The Station Agent) contrives a serious crisis for his
unlikely trio as the affable Tarik lands in deep trouble with the INS.
All that is well done and to the point, insofar as his movie challenges
the cheap absolutes of many anti-immigration moralists. McCarthy's concern,
though, is not with the soul of the nation, but with the social awakening
of one bereaved, hollowed-out man. In all this, The Visitor is
completely successful, and not to be missed.
It's
probably not an accident that McCarthy makes a Syrian (and not, say,
a Swiss) the instrument of Walter's reawakening. Though the common image
of the Middle East is dominated by terror and an alien religion ("You're
going where?!"), anyone who has traveled conscientiously
there knows that the image is at best a caricature, at worst a canard.
At the risk of selling a positive stereotype, it certainly feels odd
for many Americans to visit places where values of family, community
and hospitality still have some currency. If many of us suspect Syrians,
Jordanians, Iranians, etc. aren't quite free, it's because our standards
depend on the freedom to lead existences as emptily aloof as Walter
Vale's. In short, to end up "visitors" in our own lives.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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