The Visitor
Dir. Thomas McCarthy, feat Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira (M)
The road to white people's salvation is paved with the misery of brown and black folks, or so we learn in writer-director Tom McCarthy's sophomore feature. Not that this lesson hasn't been taught before. We've seen it in Mississippi Burning and Blood Diamond. Granted, The Visitor, which has immigration as its ostensible subject, is a softer, much less inflammatory film, but its mushy humanism is just as insidious.
The Visitor follows a trio of misfits. Widowed, depressive Connecticut College economics professor Walter (Jenkins), forced by his superior to attend a conference at NYU, finds his city apartment inhabited by two illegal aliens: Syrian Tarek (Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Gurira). The triangulation shifts to dyad bands, with Walter and Tarek bonding over drumming, just as his Arab friend, arrested in the subway for no reason, is locked away in a detention centre in Queens.
As the comfortably middle-class protagonist shells out money for an ineffectual immigration lawyer for Tarek and takes his worried mother, Mouna (Abbass), to a Broadway show, other characters are simply disappeared. But what does it matter? Walter is now a card-carrying citizen of the rhythm nation.