The Visitor

The Visitor

"In Connecticut, the widower and lonely Professor Walter Vale has a boring life. He teaches only one class at the local college and is trying to learn how to play the piano, despite not having the necessary musical talent. Walter is assigned to attend a conference about Global Policy and Development at the New York University, where he is to give a lecture about a paper that he is coauthor on. When he arrives at his apartment in New York, he finds Tarek Khalil, a syrian musician, and Zainab, a Senegalese street vendor living there. He sympathizes with the situation of the illegal immigrants and invites the couple to stay with him. Tarek invites him to go to his gig in the Jules Live Jazz and Walter is fascinated with his African drum. Tarek offers to teach Walter to play the drum. However, after an incident in the subway, Tarek is arrested by the police and sent to a detention center of immigrants. Walter hires a lawyer to defend Tarek and out of the blue, Tarek's mother Mouna appears at Walter's apartment from Michigan. He invites her to stay in Tarek's room and while trying to release Tarek, Walter and Mouna get close to each other and he finds a reason to live an exciting life again."

4 Stars

If you can get past the initial premise to this movie, then it opens up a whole bevy of emotions and really ends up being a beautiful film. The reason that I say that you need to get past the premise is that I think it is somewhat improbable. Walter (Richard Jenkins) returns home from a semester teaching in Connecticut to find two illegal immigrants living in his New York City apartment. It is really no one’s fault as Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira) were duped by a man posing as a landlord to the building through whom they thought they were leasing the apartment legally. In an act of extreme kindness (and slight stupidity) Walter allows the couple to stay with him until they find somewhere else to go. This is, in my opinion, the improbable aspect of the movie. How many of us would feel safe or comfortable with ANY stranger living under the same roof in this day and age? I don’t think I’m paranoid to think that I wouldn’t be as gracious as Walter. None the less, he does offer his hospitality and the movie goes on from there.

Walter is shown as a very simple man who has become more and more detached from people and his job since the death of his wife. His indifference is shown when he simply whites out the year on his college course’s syllabus rather than putting forth the effort of creating a new one for the semester. Even the reason for him returning to New York shows the lack of passion he feels for his job. He is forced to present a paper (for which he is the co-author) at a conference in New York. It turns out that he didn’t actually do any work on the paper; he just lent his name out to a colleague since he has such a solid academic reputation. Walter tries to convince himself that he is so unengaged with the course he is teaching because he is so focused on writing his own book, but he even has trouble convincing himself of that. The only glimpse of internal struggle we see is the fact that he apparently is trying very hard to learn the piano, a desire probably resulting from the fact that his late wife was a concert pianist.

His very mundane life is turned on its ear with the appearance of Tarek and his girlfriend. Walter immediately becomes very close to Tarek, a relationship that I think is based on the common feeling that both men have of being an outsider. Tarek is an outsider in the country and Walter seems to be an outsider in his own life. Zainab and Walter don’t have as strong of a connection, but they do get along. Walter is fascinated with the African Drum that Tarek plays every day in Washington Square park, so much so that Tarek eventually offers to teach him how to play. Things turn badly though when Tarek is arrested for a minor offense and, in turn, faces possible deportation back to Syria. Tarek’s arrest brings Tarek’s mother into Walter’s life and they experience a very interesting relationship, one that is probably the most sincere that Walter has had in a long time.

The best thing about this movie is that it doesn’t really follow any formula. I’m not saying that there are shocking plot twists, but more than once I was expecting a generic plot element to happen and it never did. The aspect was either left to the imagination or a completely different plot aspect was introduced. The acting is also brilliant. There is a constant feeling that the emotions that actors are trying to convey are raw and real. I can’t really explain why the performances stand out the way they do other than to say these people truly understood the material they were working with. So much so that Richard Jenkins was actually nominated for an Academy Award for his role. That really says something because his film was substantially less widely known than any of his fellow nominees’. The Visitor is just a movie about a guy who seems to be lost in his life at an age where most people seem to have everything figured out. It turns out this uncertainty is really a blessing in disguise in the fact that Walter ends up meeting people and doing things that he might never have had the chance to otherwise.