The Visitor

How often do you watch a film and wish it wouldn’t end? Rarely, I’d imagine. It’s like someone has led you into an alluring place that seems so right, you can’t think of being anywhere else. It’s just there, where you belong. Of course, a film invoking such feelings can be problematic. It’s bound to end, and is, by its nature, impersonal. Yet the connection is very real, and personal. Like you’ve found a friend who understands who you are, instinctively, and leads you into a world where you’d find your rightful corner, even if everything doesn’t always fit in perfectly.

And if the filmmaker is one gifted with Tom McCarthy’s compassion, you know you’re in safe hands. McCarthy’s worldview is far from simplistic, although it presumes every individual has the potential to change, to instinctively reach out in expected ways and to embrace life in a manner you’d never imagined possible. It’s also an attitude that unflinchingly acknowledges human goodness in an otherwise chaotic, ruthless, senseless world. Why else does an ordinary, listless aging Connecticut college professor like Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins – the kind of actor who’s so unfussy, you almost take his brilliance for granted) suddenly find within himself the kindness to invite complete strangers as Tarek (a fine debut by Haaz Sleiman), Zainab (Danai Gurira) and later Mouna (the stunning Hiam Abbass, last seen in Paradise Now) into his life?

When we first meet Walter, he’s a terribly uninteresting character – a widower who takes unsuccessful piano lessons to preserve his wife’s memory, recycles syllabi and mechanically carries out his professional duties, takes credit for papers he hasn’t written and hides behind the excuse of an impending book to shrug off the responsibility of teaching more classes. He’s forced to travel to New York to present a paper at a conference and lands up at his largely unused apartment to find it occupied by Tarek and Zainab, illegal immigrants from Syria and Senegal respectively, who’ve been rented the place by a conman.

First he politely asks them to leave, then, inexplicably, has an impulse to take them in when he sees them standing out on the road in the middle of the night. Given the suspicious political tone of the modern world, his decision seems incongruous, yet refreshingly innocent. Tarek, the affable musician, expresses his gratitude by introducing Walter to the magic of the Djiembe, an African drum, and this simple gesture forges an unusual camaraderie between the two men. Walter, who seems ripe for shedding his old skin from the start of the film, discovers the joy of ‘finding a rhythm’ and a meaning to his mundane life.

It’s not long before the real world intervenes, Tarek is arrested and sent off to a detention centre. His feisty mother Mouna arrives at Walter’s doorstep to knock down the last of his reserves. There’s no happy ending here, nor any political statement, except that no man-made barriers or laws are strong enough to hold people in separate compartments and that life asserts itself against all odds. McCarthy isn’t being judgmental of the American state’s policy on illegal immigrants. His concern isn’t as much with Tarek’s incarceration (whose spirit rarely sags even when he’s boxed in), as it is with Walter’s bittersweet journey of self-discovery through music, friendship, love and suffering.

People like Tarek, Zainab and Mouna are the disenfranchised, defenseless citizens of the contemporary world – oppressed in their own land and illegal immigrants in the prosperous west - yet it’s Walter the privileged, whose soul needs rescuing. It’s impossible for them to live in harmony for a sustained period, but even a transient brush with each other is enough to enrich them all.

Deepa Deosthalee