Having seen, and very much enjoyed, The Station Agent, I made a point of catching this latest one by writer-director Thomas McCarthy. It almost lived up to my expectations, but not quite. Like The Station Agent, the film is about the loneliness of modern society, and celebrates the joy of unexpected and improbable friendships. However, there is less zany humour in The Visitor, a film which tries to be serious yet shies away from uncomfortable areas, handling the issue of illegal immigration with extreme caution, almost coyness.
The film's warm humanity comes largely from its caste of likeable characters. Walter, an ageing professor teaching third world and development studies, is kind and gentle and cannot resist helping a young couple when he finds them unexpectedly living in the New York flat he rarely uses. Incidentally, I wasn't sure exactly how they managed to infiltrate it and felt that that area of the plot could have been better clarified. Anyway, Walter turns up one day to find Zainab, a young African woman, in the bath, upon which her boyfriend Tarek runs up to find out why she is screaming. After initially asking them to leave, Walter decides to invite them back as they clearly have nowhere else to go. It probably helps that they are an attractive and charismatic couple: he a talented musician and she a stylish jewellery designer. One wonders whether Walter's reaction would have been the same if they had been a little more unsavoury or just stupid. Anyway, Walter is won over when Tarek offers to teach him drumming (Walter's a would-be musician whose attempts to learn the piano after the death of his piano-teacher wife have ended miserably). With his new friend, Walter visits cool night-clubs and open-air jamming sessions and feels generally rejuvenated.
The sunny mood clouds when Tarek is arrested in the subway and kept in detention. In his efforts to help Tarek, widower Walter strikes up a relationship (of a very decorous kind) with Tarek's elegant Palestinian mother, who wants to visit Tarek in prison. Meanwhile Zainab remains in the vicinity, watching and waiting, and apparently safe from suspicion although she too is not a legal resident. The question of why Tarek was picked on for arrest rather than other, equally marginal figures, was not explained, although the lawyer whom Walter hires explains that the government is tightening up a lot in the wake of 9/11. I felt that McCarthy could have gone further - without becoming too heavy or boring - to show the range of treatment meted out to people in these circumstances. I was left wondering what was special about Tarek's case. The treatment given to the issue just seemed a little thin, and whilst I appreciate that McCarthy was trying to make a character-driven film rather than an issue-driven one, the result was a little frustrating.
The best scenes in the film were the ones of group drumming, in which the performances of the musicians were exhilarating. These high points were equivalent to the visual poetry (shots of disused and little-used railway lines winding into the distance) that made The Station Agent so beautiful and moving. The Visitor was an enjoyably bitter-sweet study of human vulnerability. Almost like E. M. Forster's novel Howards End - with its motto 'only connect' - the film showed the very human need for friendship and understanding, but it could have afforded to be a little more hard-edged without losing its appeal. Or simply be more zany: one or the other. This film ended up being neither one thing nor the other.
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