Depressed prof finds new life in friendship with immigrants

Movie dramatizes arbitrary treatment of newcomers

Richard Jenkins stars as a depressed economics professor and Haaz Sleiman portrays a talented illegal immigrant in The Visitor.

Review by GLEN ARGAN
WCR Editor

Walter Vale, a lifeless, pasty-faced economics professor, finds redemption by embracing the stranger in the movie The Visitor. America, sadly, does not.

The Visitor is a parable of a society that has lost its life and been imprisoned by its fears. Hope, in the view of director Tom McCarthy, comes from opening its doors and its heart to the vibrancy of immigrants who have come from afar.

Walter, played by Richard Jenkins, is a recently-widowed prof who has little meaningful contact with others. He treats his students with cool disdain and his research and writing is a charade. He lives in a large, empty house in Connecticut.

Walter also has an apartment in New York where he goes to stay for a few days while delivering an academic paper on globalization that he didn't write. On entering his apartment, he finds that it has been illegally rented to two Muslim immigrants, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), he from Syria and she from Senegal.

Somewhat improbably, Walter decides to allow the couple to stay in his apartment and he and Tarek become fast friends. Tarek plays an African djembe drum and Walter seeks to have his new friend show him how.

The most joyous scene of the movie has Tarek playing his drum with a couple dozen other drummers in a rousing jam session in Central Park. After some initial reluctance, Walter joins the jam too.

The rest of the film is a story of Walter breaking out of his depression as a result of his friendship with this newcomer. When Tarek runs innocently afoul of the authorities, Walter faces the challenge of showing what his friendship means.

This is also a story of a paranoid American legal system that turns its back on the United States' history of openness to immigrants. The Statue of Liberty is shrouded in mist in a country where the arbitrary, authoritarian Department of Homeland Security has the final say.

Walter finds new life; America rejects it.

The Visitor is a hopeful mixing of the personal and the political. While some of the storyline might seem improbable and the plot has the potential to veer off into sentimentality, director McCarthy makes it all believable and realistic.

At the end, one is left with the contrast between a people who possess everything but nothing of value and those who have few things but life in abundance. It's not hard to decipher where the moviemaker's sympathies lie.

(Recommended; parental guidance; coarse language.)

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