MovieTime

Review

by Julie Rigg

Walter is an academic who tries to do as little as possible, always with the excuse that he is working on his book. He is discouraging to students, and it seems has only one passion -- music. He wants to play the piano, and perseveres despite his lack of talent.

On a visit to New York he discovers that his apartment there has been rented illegally to a young couple, Zainab and Tarek. An unlikely friendship develops between the older man and the younger, a musician who helps Walter find his own way to music.

Then Tarek is picked up on the subway, and detained as an illegal immigrant.

Thomas McCarthy, the creator of this film, is best known as an actor. He is interested in society's outsiders -- those whom others see as marginal. Grief and grieving also interest him, apparently.

His first film, The Station Agent was a bitter-sweet, often comic study of a man, mourning the death of his partner, who moves to the country seeking solitude, only to be driven mad by curious locals wanting to chat. It starred the actor Peter Dinklage, born with dwarfism, and Patricia Clarkson.

In The Visitor, McCarthy cast Richard Jenkins as Walter. Jenkins -- tall, spare, elderly and plain of face under his receding hair and horn-rimmed glasses -- is an actor of near perfect technique. He is, apparently, vanity free, and you may well be startled when you see him in this film to realise you have been watching him in a variety of supporting roles for decades, roles which move from comedy to tragedy, and in all of them he has been there to serve the movie, without a trace of ego.

His Walter is such a stiff, unyielding and unloving grump at the start of the film, that it seems nothing can penetrate those defences. All the more rewarding then for us as viewers when Haas Sleiman, as the enthusiastic Tarek toting his big African drums, manages to do so without even noticing Walter's reserve.

There is a second, striking performance from the Israeli-Arab actress Hiam Abassa who, as Tarek's mother Mouna, dominates the second part of the film. She is a strong and striking presence on screen: Mouna's warmth and intelligence play against Walter's restraint.

Director Tom McCarthy's anger at America's homeland security practices and how illegal immigrants and refugees are treated post 9/11 is expressed very clearly in The Visitor.

The parallels with Australian experience are not accidental. We never see the anonymous, privately run detention centres from the inside, only as frustrated family members and friends see them -- from the outside, behind big, bland, anonymous walls, or in cramped visiting rooms. These sequences ring true in a way the drama McCarthy has constructed doesn't quite.

I found the story The Visitor tells, the relationships it constructs, a little too contrived. Rather I have an image of a North African drummer busking in a subway underpass. I envisage a middle-class American man, a writer, walking past and wondering: how can I imagine this man's story?

Director: Thomas McCarthy
Cast: Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abass, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, Marian Seldes, Maggie Moore, Michael Cumpsty, Bill McHenry, Richard Kind
Producer: Michael London, Mary Jane Skalski, Jeff Skoll
Script: Thomas McCarthy
Cinematographer: Oliver Bokelberg
Editor: Tom McArdle
Music: Jan A. P. Kaczmarek
Running time: 103
Australian distributor: Rialto
Language: English
Classification: M