Tarek disappears behind the steel doors and security cameras of our new national fear.
At last, in
this dismal spring, a good movie. Leading a small and gifted cast, actor Richard
Jenkins infuses “The Visitor” with extraordinary subtlety and he does it in a
role that most actors would have handled with exaggeration. There is no overkill
here. Under the direction of Tom McCarthy who also wrote the script, Jenkins has
created a character we believe.
So
conditioned are we to Hollywood theatrics that we wait for the drama of full
blown redemption or transcendence. Don’t wait; just settle in with Professor
Walter Vail (Richard Jenkins) and watch a real life unfold. Vail teaches one
course in economics at a Connecticut college while writing his fourth book. In
every respect he is uninspired, often gruff in his private solitude. He walks
the campus alone and is equally alone in a group of colleagues at a meeting or
in the dining hall. When he lost the wife he loved, a classical pianist, he also
lost his energy and his spirit.
When Walter
goes to New York to deliver a colleague’s paper, he heads for the apartment he
seldom uses and is surprised to find a couple who rented his place from a con
man. Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is a musician from Syria, Zainab (Sanai Gurira), a
jewelry maker from Senegal. Because we know Walter Vail well from the first
third of the movie, we are ready to watch him warm slowly to the young couple he
invites to stay on in his apartment. As he takes African drum lessons from Tarek
and drums with him on the streets of New York, he comes slowly, ever so slowly,
alive. Walter at last expresses himself in a place a world apart from his
classroom in the college where he taught for twenty years.
In a grim but
credible example of what has happened since 9/11, Tarek becomes an innocent
victim of the new immigration policy of “take your prisoner, no explanation
necessary.” Tarek disappears behind the sliding steel doors and security cameras
of our new national fear. Turned away repeatedly at the detention center when he
asks questions, Walter, the quiet academic, hits a personal turning point,
wheels around and, in the absence of a channel upward, unleashes his anger at
the receptionist.
The final
third of the movie revolves around Tarek’s mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass) who
arrives from Michigan in search of her son. The relationship that develops
between Mouna and Walter Vail is a beautiful story of love and compassion. Not
one of the actors in this lovely movie breaks the consistent tone of private
silence that Richard Jenkins and director Tom McCarthy set at the outset. In
quiet resignation, Jenkins says and does everything with understatement. It took
me by surprise, but if you can leave your conditioned expectations of emotional
fireworks at home, you too will be rewarded with the essence of first rate
acting.
Copyright (c) Illusion