Film review: The Visitor

Published on Thursday 3 July 2008 19:37

THE VISITOR (15) ****

DIRECTED BY: THOMAS McCARTHY

STARRING: RICHARD JENKINS, HAAZ SLEIMAN, HIAM ABBASS, DANAI JEKESAI GURIRA

SET in present-day New York and dealing directly with the issue of illegal immigration in the wake of the post-9/11 Homeland Security crackdown, any discussion of writer/director Thomas McCarthy's wondrous new film, The Visitor, risks making it sound like a groan-worthy issue movie. Rest assured: it's not. It is a marvellously unassuming picture that quietly gets on with the business of telling an intensely moving human story.

Veteran American character actor Richard Jenkins grabs a rare leading role here with both hands, pouring himself into Walter Vale, a vaguely depressed sixtysomething economics professor at a Connecticut college who has been drifting through life since the death of his wife. When work demands that he leaves the stultifying confines of Connecticut for New York, he returns to the apartment he's kept in the city for years only to find it has been rented without his knowledge to an illegal immigrant couple, Zainab (Danai Gurira) and Tarek (Haaz Sleiman). Unable to risk trouble with the law, they agree to leave, but after letting them walk out the door, Walter has an inexplicable change of heart and allows them to stay for a few days.

What initially follows is a gentle exploration of the way genuine friendships between different cultures can evolve from simple acts of kindness, but when Tarek falls victim to anti-Arab racial profiling and ends up in a detention centre, the film becomes a more pointed critique of a less visible form of damage that has been inflicted on the city in the wake of 9/11: the enforced removal of illegals who have made a life in the city and given something valuable back – a piece of themselves.

In less assured hands this development could have gone severely awry, but McCarthy excavates this theme with spare, meaningful writing and his actors are so nuanced that the relationships that develop between Walter and Tarek and, especially, between Walter and Tarek's mother, Mouna (played by Hiam Abbass), break the heart harder and faster than you might expect. Just check the final scenes between Walter and Mouna. With barely a word uttered they say says so much about how the smallest, most unexpected things can transform a life, yet also rails against the way panicked attempts to create the illusion of safety in New York are eliminating everything that's great about the city. Magnificent stuff.

&#149 A longer version of this review was published as part of our Edinburgh Film Festival coverage