Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Visitor / USA / 2008

Tom McCarthy follows The Station Agent with this very low-key film about a lonely Connecticut College econ professor who gets embroiled in the INS woes of an illegal Syrian immigrant who befriends him (and teaches him to play the djembe). The film constantly treads a fine line between understatement and utter banality — bone-dry dialogue, facile multiculturalism, a date to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway — but there is absolutely nothing about the film to dislike and plenty to admire. For one, McCarthy doesn’t attempt to substitute quirkiness for heart, and his characters and situations come off as totally believable (even when they are somewhat predictable). As an issue film, The Visitor might come off as slightly forced, but the issue itself is far from obvious or overblown and it’s served well by McCarthy’s style.

Best of all, however, is Richard Jenkins, who delivers invisibly brilliant supporting performances in nearly everything he’s in (usually playing some kind of loathsome or pitiable bureaucrat or stuffed shirt). At centerstage, Jenkins holds up well, and the long-suffering, ennui-scarred life of his character is succinctly rendered in Jenkins near-affectless performance. It’s unlikely to win any awards, but it’s a performance utterly suited to the character and to the overall tenor of the film, and it sustains the interest and sympathy of the audience throughout.

I also have to confess that I am a sucker for films that deal with New York and its environs as a real, lived-in place and not as a fantastic nexus of cultural mythologies about The Big City. The Visitor is precisely this kind of film, and under McCarthy’s eye even a shot of the Statue of Liberty seems like a real thing and not simply a symbol of something abstract and unattainable. This vision of the New York area — as a real place with real inhabitants and problems — is central to the object of McCarthy’s film, and it makes one particular sequence, a montage set to Fela Kuti, that much wittier and more pointed.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Overture Films 35mm Print
13 Feb 2008 5:00 PM | Submit Comment