|
The Visitor feels like a small movie though its heart is big and the issues it presents are world-encompassing. The Visitor is a quiet movie though it is filled with music, passion and the struggle to re-ignite passion. The Visitor stays contained though at its most fundamental it is a movie about the meaning and essence of freedom. It plays like a cinematic version of Japanese calligraphy, with a single deft and graceful stroke bearing a world of meaning and emotion. It is not a nakedly ambitious movie or a greedy one. Whatever its faults, cynicism or saturation are not among them. It sails entirely on the relatively serene waters of plot and character and still somehow manages to engage the heart fully, invoke great sadness and finally, even recognize a little hope.
Richard Jenkins is a character actor that you might recognize from a million movies and not be able to name any of them or the character he played. Not because they’re bad movies but because he’s an actor whose performances only serve the purpose of the story he’s trying to tell, so if told you'd recognize the movie (The Kingdom, I Heart Huckabees, North Country) and the character but the actor disappeared. Like David Straithairn a few years ago in Good Night and Good Luck, he’s a career character actor and this role gives him that one showcase where he can really strut the deftness of his craft and the breadth of his chops. His Walter Vale is a quiet marvel, the kind of character that A-listers either won’t or can’t deliver. He’s a real person. At no point in the movie do you find Jenkins peering from behind the mask or Jenkins ego disrupting the surface. It’s not a showy performance so he won’t win a lot of awards for it and that’s too bad, but for those of you who understand and appreciate the art of acting and what it entails, his performance is refreshing.It's as though you were watching a bud blossom into a flower: at first it seem like nothing is happening and then, all of a sudden, there is splendor.
|  |
| Walter Vale’s life died years ago with his wife. He teaches at a university a class he doesn’t care about. He has space in his heart for neither students nor colleagues. He is a dead man walking. He is aware that something is missing, that something must be wrong because he keeps trying to find music in his life but only manages to work his way through one piano teacher after another, neither understanding nor recognizing the nature of his obstacles that keep him from learning. Finally, he is forced to engage in the world around him when returning to an apartment in New York he’s owned since his marriage. There he finds a young couple apparently squatting in his apartment. The place has been “rented” to them by some unsavory character whom we never meet and they are as shocked to meet Walter as he is to meet them. The couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), are beautiful, in love and illegal. He is from Syria and she is from Senegal. They are artists, he a musician and she a jewelry maker. Vale’s reaction to them comes as a bit of a shock. He could flip out. He could call the cops. There are a lot of things he could do that he chooses not to. Instead, after he realizes they have nowhere to go, he lets them stay. It’s a beautiful piece of writing because of everything that’s gone before. You realize that the moment when he first encounters them might be the most alive he’s felt in decades and then you understand why he might be so willing to let them stay. It is not solely an act of spiritual generosity, it is also an act of spiritual need. They need a place to stay. He needs to fill the hole in his heart. |
Luckily, the young couple and especially Tarek, a djembe player, are especially suited to this role. It feels almost too precious to say – and that’s a shame – but Tarek loves life and he loves people. Even the quiet moments of his life are filled with passion. Is there a lot in the world to be angry about? Without a doubt. But Tarek, who lives his life actually on the edge, whose father was a political prisoner in Syria and who himself now is in constant danger of deportation, makes a choice to embrace the wonder of life. He creates and celebrates rather than rails against or destroys. In the context of twenty-first century cinema, this makes Tarek, a young man of color, practically a revolutionary figure. If all he did was use guns and drugs he would be embraced by certain segments as an “edgy” or “gritty” anti-hero. He does neither. He just loves and makes music. It is through music that he gives his greatest gift to Vale. The college professor who has been frustrated for years at trying to play the piano, now finds the djembe speaking to his heart. Haaz Sleiman is an actor of expansive charisma. His aura is inclusive, he constantly lets the audience and the other actors in. So often in movies actors and directors depend on violence, anger and or sex to create an indelible impression. Sleiman’s Tarek stays with you because he’s an extraordinary person. He is, Heaven forfend, a nice guy.
|  |
Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira) is much less open. From the beginning she is distrustful, not so much of Walter Vale in particular but the situation in general. Like Tarek, she has the history that merits her response, but she just chooses to make a different choice -- the choice that most of us would make. That she is so in love with Tarek is testament to the fact that she wishes she were different, that she could have the same courage, the same lightness that Tarek has. Instead, she carries danger like a yoke around her shoulders. Watching Gurira slowly pull Zainab’s curtains back over the course of the movie is fascinating. 
| Hiam Abbas is an actor whose reputation is slowly growing on these shores and with good reason. Here she plays Tarek’s mother, Mouna. She has moments of such extraordinary grace and economy that they are breathtaking. It hurts your heart to watch her and not necessarily in the moments you would expect. When she first meets Zainab they discuss the nature of the young girl’s relationship with Mouna’s son, Tarek. Even as Zainab stumbles into uncomfortable silence, you can feel Mouna’s recognition of the great love this girl feels for her son, her appreciation of that love and her willingness to cradle, as much as possible, this young girl’s heart. Abbas so clearly delineates a mother who has loves greatly and has suffered greatly, who understands so much more than she feels the need to let on and who is both aware and accepting of the world she lives in that she feels like a character you’ve never seen before in a movie. With everything that is going on around her she still has the capacity to enjoy a night of music. Like Tarek, she becomes a lesson for Vale as well as a facilitator of his growth. She is a magnificent creation. |
The Visitor could be seen as a political film or propagandist. Certainly, many of the obstacles presented to the characters are political in nature. In fact, however, McCarthy has created a film about people struggling to define themselves in the world we live in. That this society is demarcated by politics and money is just the nature of the beast, the immovable object we must all contend with. Still, McCarthy chooses time and again to take the quiet route. Vale’s rebellion at the end doesn’t have a car chase or an explosion attached to it and is a more active rebellion because of it. So often we just don’t get it. We choose to fight violence with violence, to battle greed with money, to struggle against intolerance with inflammatory propaganda. If we really want to make the world a different place, a better place, doesn’t it make more sense to actually make a different choice?
| 
|
|
