Thomas McCarthy's two films, The Station Agent and The Visitor, are both concerned with a person not in his element of social space, of being disconnected from other people and not really based on him wanting it on himself, but somehow finds people to connect with without any force and gets wrapped up in their lives because he is, basically, a good person. Peter Dinklage played the former title character, and now we have Richard Jenkins (a veteran character we all know and admire but never really peg who he is most of the time he shows up) as a middle aged college professor who's wife has passed on and doesn't have any passion for teaching or writing his next book.
He takes begrudgingly a task to give a speech on a paper he only co-wrote in name in New York City, and finds in his old apartment a couple (Syrian and African played by Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) who have been living there for a couple of months. Somehow a bond grows between them, mostly between the two men over playing on the drum. Then something happens, tragically, which changes everything, but it's not what you might think at first.
It would appear that the Visitor is a film about the underrated horror of the problems of being an illegal in America, and the processes of the government basically not giving a damn about most of the people, and most of whom haven't done a thing. While McCarthy nears the film towards preachy ground in these bits, they're few and far between. His great strength is in making value out of good people forced into circumstances that make them show how good they really are. Jenkins could just leave the guy behind in that jail, but there's something about his plight that affects him, not simply for the obvious but because of a connection on a pure level (through, most crucially, music) that goes beyond class or race or whatever.
It's a very precise moral story, but it needs the performances to carry it. Luckily, McCarthy is an actor's director, and Jenkins is able to be subtle about it and able to convey frustration when required very naturally. He depicts a loneliness to the character that is cracked through his ties to these new characters, including Tarek's mother, and all of the actors around him are up to 'snuff' too (especially Haaz Sleiman as the good-natured man who got screwed over by a faulty immigration process). They help make such a small-scale story worth telling, and it's a true sleeper that demands some more attention, at some point or another, which might be on video or on the inevitable screenings on the IFC channel.
He takes begrudgingly a task to give a speech on a paper he only co-wrote in name in New York City, and finds in his old apartment a couple (Syrian and African played by Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) who have been living there for a couple of months. Somehow a bond grows between them, mostly between the two men over playing on the drum. Then something happens, tragically, which changes everything, but it's not what you might think at first.
It would appear that the Visitor is a film about the underrated horror of the problems of being an illegal in America, and the processes of the government basically not giving a damn about most of the people, and most of whom haven't done a thing. While McCarthy nears the film towards preachy ground in these bits, they're few and far between. His great strength is in making value out of good people forced into circumstances that make them show how good they really are. Jenkins could just leave the guy behind in that jail, but there's something about his plight that affects him, not simply for the obvious but because of a connection on a pure level (through, most crucially, music) that goes beyond class or race or whatever.
It's a very precise moral story, but it needs the performances to carry it. Luckily, McCarthy is an actor's director, and Jenkins is able to be subtle about it and able to convey frustration when required very naturally. He depicts a loneliness to the character that is cracked through his ties to these new characters, including Tarek's mother, and all of the actors around him are up to 'snuff' too (especially Haaz Sleiman as the good-natured man who got screwed over by a faulty immigration process). They help make such a small-scale story worth telling, and it's a true sleeper that demands some more attention, at some point or another, which might be on video or on the inevitable screenings on the IFC channel.