At the Movies  “The Visitor”:  Well Worth Visiting

– By Mitch Silver –

What if someone told you the writer and the director of “The Station Agent” had teamed up again to produce another small gem? Well, they have. Or more precisely, he has: Thomas McCarthy has spent the last four years writing and then directing “The Visitor,” a tenderly heartbreaking love story in the spirit of Jim Sheridan’s “In America” and Mira Nair’s “The Namesake.”
Actually, “The Visitor” is six love stories in one. When it begins, widower Walter Vale — wonderfully underplayed by Richard Jenkins, the father of the Fisher family of undertakers on HBO’s “Six Feet Under” — takes a piano lesson from Marian Seldes, who informs him, not unkindly, that he has no natural talent for the instrument. Only later do we discover Vale’s late wife was the classical pianist who played that piano, and that Walter is trying to keep the connection alive.
A middle-aged economics professor at Connecticut College who’s just going through the motions, Vale is pushed by his department chairman to deliver a paper on globalization at an academic conference at NYU. In the city, he discovers a young couple living in his seldom-used apartment. Tarek and Zainab are victims of a rent scam and hastily agree to vacate the place, until Walter realizes they have nowhere to go. Unlike “The Goodbye Girl”, this makeshift arrangement proves to be Walter’s spiritual  — and cultural — re-awakening.
Tarek, from Syria, loves to drum and spends much of his free time at the Drum Circle in Central Park. Zainab, who is Senegalese, designs and sells her own jewelry at a flea market. Their love for each other and for the music awakens Walter’s love for music as well. It’s delightful watching the reserved Walter Vale, in suit and tie, step into the circle and join in the drumming.
But “The Visitor” has more on its mind. Namely, the Patriot Act. Through a misunderstanding, Tarek, strongly acted by Haaz Sleiman, is taken into custody by the police and incarcerated in a federal detention center in Queens. His mother in Michigan stops getting her daily phone calls from her son and comes to New York to discover he’s in jail (and, by the way, that he’s been living with a girl who, she notes, “is very black”).
What sees this movie through isn’t Tarek’s and Walter’s rage against the system, but the love this little knot of people find they have for each other. And ultimately, Walter’s love of the music they share. 
In lesser hands, this film would concern itself with Ivan, the unseen rent scam artist, or with the students Walter leaves behind. But Thomas McCarthy focuses himself, and us, not on the bonds we humans break, but on the ones we make, even humans, seemingly, with nothing in common.
Who’s Tom McCarthy? Besides writing and directing, he’s one of the busiest actors you’ve probably never heard of, appearing in the multiplexes right now as Kate's date in “Baby Mama” and on TV as Scott Templeton in "The Wire". He’s acted in “Michael Clayton”, “Flags of Our Fathers”, “All the King's Men”, “Syriana” and “Good Night and Good Luck”. He knows how to do more with a glance or a sigh than Michael Bay does with an entire aircraft carrier.
The title of “The Visitor” might seem to refer to Walter Vale’s visits to Tarek in prison. But he’s really visiting real life, the life he thought ended with his wife’s death. And I’m happy to say, he’s decided to stay awhile.