Just two projects into his
filmmaking career, writer-director-actor Tom McCarthy is already establishing
himself as the best friend of the veteran character actor. His breakthrough
debut, The Station Agent, gave
Peter Dinklage a star-making lead role after a string of scene-stealing
supporting turns. McCarthy's follow-up, The Visitor, does the same for Richard Jenkins, a
Coen brothers fixture and ubiquitous supporting player with a pasty complexion
and the hangdog face of a depressed mid-level bureaucrat.
In a rare lead performance, Jenkins
stars as a melancholy professor sleepwalking glumly through his life and
career. His terminally beige existence begins to change when he encounters a
vibrant international couple living illegally in an apartment he keeps in New
York: an ebullient Arab drummer (Haaz Sleiman) and his understandably skittish
African girlfriend (Danai Gurira). Jenkins begins taking percussion lessons
from Sleiman, and as they give in to the rhythm, an unlikely friendship
develops, though in American independent films, unlikely friendships tend to
develop with more frequency than in the real world. Just when the film
threatens to devolve into a variation on Shall We Dance, it takes a sharp political turn once
Sleiman is arrested and placed in a detention center for illegal immigrants.
Jenkins jumps to action on his new friend's behalf and develops a tentative,
unsteady acquaintance with Sleiman's beautiful mother that threatens to turn
into something more.
As with The Station Agent, The Visitor is a low-key, naturalistic,
beautifully observed character study about the quiet angst of the buttoned-down
soul. It's an actors' showcase characterized by subtlety and restraint rather
than flashy histrionics; like Dinklage in Station Agent, Jenkins maintains a great stillness
at the core of his finely modulated performance as he undergoes a gradual
emotional thaw. McCarthy imbues a hoary old staple of low-budget American
film—an unlikely conglomeration of misfits who come together to form an
unlikely family—with sensitivity and grace. Like few of his filmmaking
peers, he understands and respects the power of quiet, and how a whisper can be
as explosive as a shout.