Visitor, The

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Thomas McCarthy's first film, "The Station Agent" (2003), dealt with a dwarf whose life changes after his best friend dies and he relocates to Newfoundland, New Jersey to claim the abandoned train station his friend left him. There, he meets two people who change his life in small but significant ways.

Loss and new acquaintances form the basis for McCarthy's second film as well, but it's far from a rehash. Richard Jenkins ("Six Feet Under") plays Prof. Walter Vale, a stiff and methodical bit of dead wood at a Connecticut college who hasn't taught anything different for the past 20 years. Though he keeps telling people his scaling back to one course enables him to focus on his book, there is no book. There's only a profound loneliness and sense of being lost in any translation that colors his days and nights--a feeling of dislocation one suspects was compounded, if not begun, when his concert pianist wife died six years ago.

Jenkins' face registers a thinking man who's clearly adrift, much more than the stupified numbness we saw in Jack Nicholson's character in "About Schmidt" or Bill Murray's in "Lost in Translation." Things are going on inside his head. It's just that his loss has left him nearly as unable to summon emotions or express himself as if he had had a stroke. He doesn't have the strength or energy to think or feel. In the outset, we see him half-heartedly attempting to connect with his happier past by taking a piano lesson from his fourth teacher, and finding that it just doesn't work. And we see him rejecting a student's late paper for being late because clearly the student's "personal reasons" can't possibly measure up to the sadness of his own life.

Then he's asked to present a paper he "co-wrote" at a conference after the principal (i.e., only) author is restricted to pregnancy bed rest and can't travel to New York City for the conference. Walter protests, confessing that he really didn't have anything to do with the paper, but he's forced to replace her. We don't get the full story, but the feeling is that he and his wife kept two apartments--one near his college and one in New York City near her concert venues--because Walter meets an old neighbor/tenant who remembers how beautifully his wife played.

But when he uses his key to enter the apartment, he notices unfamiliar possessions here and there, and a vase of fresh flowers on the coffee table. In the darkness, he moves cautiously from room to room, finally pushing open the bathroom door where the only light shines. And then a black woman taking a bath screams, he closes the door, and the next thing you know he's got a man rushing into the apartment grabbing him by the throat--not exactly the return he expected. Within moments, though, he's able to communicate that the apartment is his and discovers that the couple were told they could live there by a "friend" of the owner whose name Walter didn't even recognize. They pack up and leave, but Walter has second thoughts and tells them they can stay a few days until they find another place. And that sets the stage for a fascinating human drama.

What makes this little independent film work so well are the layers that transform a simple reawakening plot into a complex narrative tapestry that produces irony, pathos, anger, and ultimately hope. The conference Walter attends at NYU is on Global Policy and Development, and McCarthy's script cleverly juxtaposes images of a largely white and staid group of academics against the more tangible "global" world that's living right inside his old apartment: a Syrian jazz djembe player named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his jewelry-making Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). Walter, of course, learns more about global policies and problems from his empirical contact with them than he could ever learn at one of the conference sessions. In fact, while those sessions are in progress, Walter, who had been learning how to drum from the likeable Syrian, follows his friend all over town, watching him perform in a club and drumming with him on the subway platform and in a Central Park drum circle. There are contrasts, too, between the serious and suspicious Zainab and the carefree Tarek, and Walter grows some more when his friend is arrested in an incident of racial profiling and is taken to Immigration. Since Zainab is also illegal, she cannot visit him, and neither can Tarek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), who turns up unexpectedly and also ends up spending time with Walter. It falls to Walter to act, and we get the feeling that this action--however successful or unsuccessful, will be the key to his own renewal.

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