Character actor Richard Jenkins gives a fine performance as a middle-aged professor who, returning to his temporarily abandoned New York apartment, finds an immigrant couple living there. It’s a misunderstanding, and so accommodation, not confrontation, results.
Some aspects of United States immigration policy are depicted, but the movie doesn’t seem intended to be political. It seems at first like it’s going to be one of those dramas where the colored folks (he’s Syrian, she’s Senegalese) teach the old white dude how to be hip. The professor, a widower, discovers an unlikely affinity for African drumming and gets lessons from the younger man. But the main story is of a lonely man finding an unexpected way out of a rut. For the couple, it is a story of the fragile world some people inhabit and the tiny happenstance that turns their lives around. For writer-director Tom McCarthy, it’s the follow up to The Station Agent, another tale of disparate people coming together, although here the immigrants are secondary characters. While The Visitor lacks the humor and quirky charm of that film, there’s a similar warmness to the storytelling, and McCarthy easily avoids the sophomore slump.
IMDB link
viewed 6/6/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 6/25/08
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