The Visitor (PG-13) Movie Review

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) teaches economics at a college in Connecticut. He’s been pretty much sleepwalking through his life since his wife died and maybe for a while before that. The late Mrs. Vale had been a concert pianist and taught piano as well. As the film opens Walter is trying to learn to play his wife’s instrument although, as his fourth would-be teacher tells him, he has no aptitude for it.

Whatever enthusiasm he had for teaching economics, hard to imagine given that it’s known as “the dismal science,” has long since left him and he’s seen creating this semester’s syllabus by taking white out to last year’s. When called upon to give a paper he co-authored with a younger colleague he tries to avoid it by admitting that he hadn’t really done any of the work, just put his name on it to lend his prestige to the work. Boxed in, he has to go. It’s no large imposition though. He has an apartment in New York, where the conference is being held, although he hasn’t been there in a long time.

Arriving at the apartment he finds a young couple, squatters, who’ve been paying someone named “Ivan” to rent the place. Walter doesn’t know Ivan from Adam’s off ox and squatters, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), quickly pack up their belongings and agree to leave. But Walter offers to let them stay for a few days till they can find a place of their own. A lot can happen in a few days.

Tarek, who plays a drum in a jazz combo, finds that Walter has more aptitude for the drum than he did the piano. Truth be told, Tarek – a warm, engaging young man – is a better teacher than the piano professional. He’s encouraging and reinforcing and Walter quickly gains a measure of confidence with the instrument. Enough that he joins Tarek in playing in an ad hoc drum band in Central Park. On the way home Tarek is caught in the subway turnstile with the drum and police wrongly pull him aside for jumping the fare. It’s all a small understanding that would have been cleared up in a few minutes, a few hours at most, but for the fact that Tarek is an illegal alien.

I’ve read that writer/director Thomas McCarthy says he was making a story about people, but so much of the plot is focused on America’s massively screwed up immigration system that what I saw was a film that centered on that. The only time Walter Vale’s displays any degree of emotion is when he’s gone to visit Tarek in one of immigration’s detention facilities.

I was a little uncomfortable with what appeared to me as Vale as the heroic Anglo figure but you can decide about that for yourself. The film is well acted and the story is engaging and worth seeing.