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The Visitor

Richard Jenkins gives an Oscar-nominated performance as Walter Vale, a widowed professor stuck in a rut. He has been teaching the same class for a number of years and no longer cares about it. To bring some joy back into his life he is, unsuccessfully, attempting to learn to play the piano, the profession of his late wife.

Walter leaves his home in Connecticut to present a paper at NYU. He has not been to his apartment in the city and arrives only to find that an illegal immigrant couple has moved in through some housing scam. Rather than throw them to the streets, Walter allows Syrian musician Tarek and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab, to stay with him until they can find another place to live. The unlikely friendship that develops between Walter and Tarek will move his life in a new direction. The drums, Tarek’s instrument of choice, do for Walter what the piano couldn’t.

The film becomes about more than Walter’s liberation from his lackluster routine when Tarek’s immigration status is called into question by authorities. What follows is a moving examination of the injustice of American immigration policies.

Director Tom McCarthy takes a sympathetic approach to Tarek’s plight, as does Walter who decides to remain in the city until Tarek’s situation is resolved.

Not action-packed, “The Visitor” is a sensitive look at human relationships within the post 9/11 social and political climate. Great performances from Jenkins, as well as the relative unknowns playing Tarek and Zainab, drive the film that can give audiences feelings of both inspiration and, at times, frustration at the system in which the characters are trapped.

Written by: Monica Burton

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