Thomas McCarthy’s The
Visitor is a character study drowning in liberal guilt, equal parts
social-message movie and in-depth portrait of a figuratively dying man’s
rebirth. Connecticut professor Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is a despondent
walking corpse whose life is shaken by his discovery that – for reasons left
absurdly oblique – a Muslim couple, Syrian Tariq (Haaz Sleiman) and Senegalese
Zainab (Danai Gurira), are residing in his seldom-used Manhattan apartment.
McCarthy’s attentive direction takes great pains to convey Walter’s detachment
by lingering on him staring out of windows or at street performers, the
widower’s sad disposition slowly dissolving once he allows the strangers to
stay in his place and, soon afterwards, he begins taking drum lessons from
Tariq. When the young Syrian is arrested and thrown into a Queens detention
center for illegal immigrants, The
Visitor begins modestly sermonizing about the supposed unjustness of
current domestic immigration policy, albeit from the perspective not of Tariq
(whose future is actually at stake) but of Walter. Such a point of view openly
reveals McCarthy’s chief subject matter to be liberal Caucasians’ shame and
remorse over illegal immigration rather than America’s complex post-9/11
relations with its foreign-born population. And as a result, his visual
political signifiers (such as a “Support Our Troops” banner hanging on a
highway overpass) merely feel like topical window dressing for the facile – if,
at least with regards to Jenkins, soulfully performed – story of a man
learning, from one family’s deportation-facilitated disintegration, to stop
being a worthless mope and live again.
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