(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.)
The Visitor opens with a glum professor going through the motions. Walter is taking piano lessons in an effort to sustain the memory of his dead piano teacher wife, grading papers in his east coast campus office, dryly delivering papers at a Manhattan conference. Even though he doesn’t admit it to anyone until later in the film, it is clear that he has given up, coasting through the remainder of his career in resignation. And then as the titular Visitor, in his own forsaken New York apartment he stumbles across an invisible class through which he encounters a deeper, more relevant form of sorrow. Apart from the loss of his wife and his poor piano skills, he has little to complain about: a house in Connecticut, an apartment in New York, a comfortable tenure in a university. He has achieved the American ideal in which a reasonable sadness, such as being widowed, can justify an entire lifestyle of seclusion, socially irrelevant self-reflection, and the sort of i-pod isolation that revels in listening to classical music while staring out of one’s windows in the suburbs.
This is until Walter spends the night in his New York apartment while at a conference in the area and finds that two illegal immigrants have been staying there during his lengthy absence, tricked into thinking the rental arrangement is legal. Tarek and Zainab leave in a flurry of apologies, only to be very unexpectedly invited back in by Walter until they can get on their feet. The remainder of the film is spent tracking Walter’s response to these new friends, his passion for music rekindled as Tarek teaches him to play the drums, his confidence growing in forays outside his comfort zone. When Tarek is arrested, Walter becomes as impassioned as Walter can be in an attempt to free him from detention. Here the story turns towards tragedy, but unlike the sadness related to his wife, this grief is the kind that opens Walter to others, to the difficulties of people he has never noticed, and connects him to a world that opens his moral horizons. This would all be a bit hackneyed if it wasn’t for the understated direction of Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass, and the others. I rarely comment on actors, but McCarthy (an actor himself) seems acutely aware of gesture as a form of communication in his editing. Walter perfectly captures the bewildered, unsure, and awkward manners of an East Coast academic more confident in the classroom. Many of the memorable edits involve Walter holding a letter up to the prison partition glass and turning his head so Tarek can read it in privacy, leaning down to talk to the guards through a slot in their window, or kindly manning Zainab’s jewelry booth while she grabs a cup of tea. The Visitor is a character study with a social conscience, Walter a Moviegoer or Stranger awakened by a couple who haven’t been in America long enough to see the Twin Towers.
The ambiguity of the title, as there are any number of visitors in the film, comes to a head in the last scene. Walter has been practicing the drums with Tarek, even joining in the cultural panoply that is the drum circle in a local park, complete with dancers, whistles, and unidentifiable percussion instruments. The last scene has him in the subway with his drum, a long shot, Walter sitting on the bench in the middle of the screen. He sets the drum on the ground, a white balding man in a button down oxford, and begins to hammer out an exotic, mournful beat. It increases in intensity, Walter’s head lowering over the instrument, and the film closes in a lonely rush of trains and cracking drum beats. Godard’s Slow Motion and Haneke’s Code Unknown both end this way, in a flare of music and drums. Here, the end of The Visitor hits the same note. Walter has encountered otherness, and been shaped by it. The very fact that the other has a name, face, nationality, and address lends his grief a generosity and authenticity that his other life had not afforded him. Here in the subway he can enjoy his wife’s memory on a different instrument.