The Visitor
Tom McCarthy (2007)
It’s probably a coincidence that the protagonist of The Visitor, an emotionally isolated economics professor, shares a surname with the spinster heroine of Now, Voyager – but Walter Vale is such an old-fashioned name, for a sixtyish man in a story set in the first decade of this century, that I did wonder if he and Bette Davis’s Charlotte were meant to be somehow related. In the first ten minutes or so of The Visitor, Walter (Richard Jenkins) displays a curious habit of speaking his mind rather late in the day. A woman comes to his Connecticut home to give him a piano lesson: he doesn’t tell her he doesn’t want a second one until she says same time next week as she leaves the house. A student hands in an essay and apologises for its lateness: Walter doesn’t reject it immediately – he takes the essay and looks at it briefly, then announces that he can’t accept it because it’s late. I couldn’t tell from these moments whether the writer-director Tom McCarthy was saying something about Walter Vale’s personality but, if so, he doesn’t say it again. Other aspects of Walter are puzzling too. He goes reluctantly to a conference in New York to deliver a research paper and returns to the Manhattan apartment he owns to find a couple living in it – a Syrian man (Haaz Sleiman) and a Senegalese woman (Danai Gurira). Walter is less curious than you might expect about how the swindler who rented the apartment to the couple had keys to the place. It’s hard to tell from all this whether McCarthy is presenting, and deciding not to explain, a complex character; or whether his script is concerned with driving the story forward at the expense of credibility.
What is clear in the early stages is that Walter Vale, a widower, is solitary. His late wife, whom Walter still misses greatly, was a concert pianist. (Later on, we learn he has a son living in London but there’s no contact between them at any stage.) The Syrian Tarek plays the djembe – a skin-covered drum played with the bare hands – and Walter is increasingly drawn to its rhythms, and starts trying the instrument himself, having admitted to himself that, as the short-lived teacher (Marian Seldes) suggested, he has no real talent for the piano. Tarek is a member of a drum circle who regularly get together in Central Park; Walter, tentative at first but gradually emerging from his shell, joins them. In other words, Tom McCarthy’s writing is neatly obvious: Walter has tried to play the piano in a desperate attempt to revive a connection with his pianist wife; Tarek – with his gravely beautiful, wary partner Zeinab (she designs ethnic jewellery and sells it at a local market) – brings a new music into Walter’s lonely, constricted existence. It turns out that he isn’t even research-actively wrapped up in his own little academic world. Although he’s named as a co-author on the paper he presents to the conference, Walter admits he hasn’t even read it. His teaching load is minimal to allow him to write a book – he eventually confesses he’s getting nowhere with it. Not unexpectedly, in view of his apartment guests, the theme of the academic conference is global policy and development. Even less unexpectedly, Tarek and Zeinab, although they’ve been in the US for some time, are illegal immigrants. Negotiating a subway turnstile one day with Walter, Tarek is wrongly suspected of fare-dodging: he’s arrested and put in a deportation centre in Queens.
The Visitor was the film which gave Richard Jenkins the rare opportunity of a starring role and which earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination and other critical plaudits. The praise was justified: he gives a superbly subtle performance – and his lack of showiness is unusual enough to be compelling in itself. (I expect Jenkins himself realises that this movie was almost bound to be a one-off but his success in The Visitor has at least paved the way to some decent supporting roles since.) We in the audience can see the unhappiness in Walter Vale’s eyes that’s hidden from people in the world in which he lives – people who wouldn’t be on the lookout for it. Jenkins’ deadpan wit means that he’s also often funny. He reminds you very convincingly how usually mild-mannered, suppressive personalities – when they let their niceness slip momentarily – can, inadvertently, be much more verbally hurtful than habitually aggressive types. (I know what I’m talking about here.) When Walter gets angry in the detention centre, you can feel how long it is since he’s raised his voice – it takes him a while to blow off the cobwebs and persuade himself that he’s capable of yelling.
The Visitor is partly a character study, partly a post-9/11 immigration drama. When the two elements are balanced, the film is engaging – especially when Tarek’s elegant, rather mysterious mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) arrives in New York from her home in Michigan (she’s a legal immigrant whose late husband was a political journalist in Syria) and an uneasy friendship with Walter develops into something verging on an affair. The picture’s much less good when the character of Walter takes second place to the immigration drama because the latter is pretty uninspired. Richard Jenkins has to spend too long merely reacting to it when it would have been more interesting to see him develop the character further. Tarek is eventually deported to Syria and Mouna follows him back there. Walter returns to his lonesome, underemployed life. Tarek had mentioned to him, just before his arrest, that he’d like to play the djembe on the New York subway and, in the film’s final scene, Walter sits down and does just that. Richard Jenkins’ controlled passion on the drum is impressive but this ending is too predictable (and has been too prepared for) to have the impact Tom McCarthy intends. Still, the djembe sounds are considerably better than the film’s main score – generic modestly hopeful music by Jan A P Kaczmarek. The title could refer to multiple characters – Walter going to see Tarek in the detention centre, Mouna in New York, Tarek in the USA, even that one-lesson piano teacher.
26 March 2012