Thomas McCarthy has written and directed only two movies — The Station Agent and, now, The Visitor — but it's already safe to say that little people are very much on his mind. The central character in The Station Agent is literally a dwarf, as you may know, but that's really beside the point; McCarthy's vision of little people has nothing to do with physical size and everything to do with being diminished by life and cut off from some essential sense of self.
In The Visitor, our focal point is Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), a sullen, repressed college professor who parallels the sullen, repressed hero of The Station Agent so closely that they might be the same person. Both men are painfully self-aware loners whose self-imposed isolation is finally eroded by the good counsel of an ethnic person more in tune with the vibrations of Mother Earth.
The Station Agent's dwarf is nudged back into the game by a smiling Cuban who dispenses steaming café con leche and homespun insights. In The Visitor, it's a friendly Arab percussionist who puts mopey Walter back in touch with himself, urging the over-analytical prof, "Don't think!"
In many ways, The Visitor might even be seen as another attempt to tell the story of The Station Agent, albeit with a more conventional narrative focus and a plainly drawn political message that plays a little too neatly into contemporary passions. And while I personally prefer the playful ambiguities and rougher edges of The Station Agent to The Visitor's more easily digestible emotions, it's hard not to admire McCarthy's skill at avoiding undue compromise while retooling his themes in a more commercially viable direction.
Much of the film's success can be attributed to Jenkins (the balding, pockmarked character actor best known as the ghost-dad from HBO's Six Feet Under), whose beautifully underplayed performance exudes an authenticity that transcends the various clichés with which the film flirts. It's both engaging and agonizing to watch Jenkins' Walter Vale going through the motions of being involved with a life that has long ceased to hold much meaning. He's an old dog actively resisting new tricks, recycling yet another course syllabus for yet another batch of students, barely able to feign interest in exchanging pleasantries with colleagues, puttering around the house in a starchy suit and an exoskeleton of icy reserve.
The story kicks in when Walter travels to New York for a conference he has no interest in attending and enters his infrequently used Manhattan apartment to discover a pair of illegal immigrants squatting there. Reluctant to eject the distraught couple in the middle of night, Walter agrees to let them stay "a couple of days" — a deadline that lapses and extends itself by mutual consent, as Walter finds himself enjoying the company of the gregarious Syrian Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira).
Soon enough, Walter is tagging along to the downtown clubs where Tarek plays percussion, and the tragically rigid academic even begins to loosen up as he finds himself grooving on drum lessons from the good-natured Arab. From there it's a short step to Tarek and Walter hanging out like best buds, sharing falafels and sitting in on the drum circles in Washington Square Park.
McCarthy is too good a filmmaker to allow this to feel like a typical odd-couple bonding scenario, but the movie does become a little too reductive for its own good, often eschewing the thornier dynamics and more nuanced approach of The Station Agent for an oversimplified infatuation with the Exotic Other.
From the almost two-dimensional saintliness of Tarek and Zainab to those pivotal drum-circle images of the middle-aged, buttoned-up white guy surrounded by sweaty, shirtless and broadly beaming black and brown bodies, The Visitor sometimes comes perilously close to seeming naïve and possibly a little condescending. And when McCarthy repeatedly parallels the raw vitality of those drummers with scenes of Walter at his conference, suffering through speech after dry speech on emerging Third World economies, it's impossible not to get his drift.
As if you hadn't guessed, there's a big, fat political agenda bubbling just beneath the surface here, and it all comes surging front and center when Tarek is arrested on a petty infraction and winds up being sent to a detention center for illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists (the vast majority of whom, like Tarek, are Muslims). With Zainab's illegal status making it impossible for her to contact her boyfriend in custody, Walter assumes the role of Tarek's principal supporter, visiting him regularly and helping him navigate the mountains of red tape placed in his way by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
The politics are a bit black-and-white, and the movie isn't exactly shy about manipulating our emotions, but The Visitor is often very good when discreetly demonstrating its finer points, particularly how seemingly dissimilar peoples are sometimes more alike than not. Walter is ultimately every bit as much a stranger in a strange land as Tarek — although Walter's prison is his own skin — and McCarthy makes a strong case that, in one way or another, we're all just visitors here — transients, temporary riders on this bus called America.
If only The Visitor didn't push its big messages so aggressively and took a cue from its cherished little people — that sometimes less really can be more — McCarthy's movie could have been something special.
