Richard Jenkins Turns in a Subtle, Superb Performance in The Visitor

I didn't make too much of an effort to see a lot of nominees before the Oscars this year, but I did peruse Netflix and find a few films that were recognized by the Academy and were actually out on DVD already. One of the ones I added to the list was Tom McCarthy's The Visitor, for which Richard Jenkins received a Best Actor nomination.

A few years back, McCarthy directed The Station Agent, a quiet movie about a little person named Fin who moves into a train depot in the middle of nowhere after the death of his only friend. The two movies are similar in many ways. Like Fin, Professor Walter Vale (Jenkins) is recently bereaved and not very sociable. Just as gregarious hot dog vendor Joe helps bring Fin out of his shell, cheerful Syrian musician Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) is a liberating influence on Walter, despite the awkward circumstances of their meeting.

Walter spends most of his time in Connecticut, but he owns a Manhattan flat, and he's startled when he enters one day and finds two immigrants living there. One is Tarek, the other his stand-offish girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), who is from Senegal and earns money selling handmade jewelry. They claim to have rented the flat from someone Walter has never heard of and offer to vacate the premises immediately. At first, he agrees, but they're not long gone before he chases them down and invites them to come back.

So begins an unconventional friendship that deepens when Walter discovers his fondness for Tarek's African drum-playing and begins to learn how to play the large instrument himself. The first half of the film has a fairly light, buddy comedy feel to it, but it takes a more sober tone when Tarek is arrested and faces deportation, as we discover he is an illegal immigrant. While Walter tries to find a way to free his friend, he develops romantic feelings for Tarek's mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass), who comes to New York from Michigan to be near her son during his ordeal.

Clearly, McCarthy is making a political statement about illegal immigration in his movie, but mostly, it's a moving human story. Jenkins is wonderfully understated as the repressed professor whose window into another culture awakens passions he didn't know he had. Though he finds interaction with others awkward, he is polite and considerate to Tarek, Zainab and Mouna and eventually grows genuinely comfortable around them.

There's a lot of subtle humor to his mannerisms, and I found myself reminded a bit of James Cromwell's Farmer Hoggett as I watched. While it's intriguing to watch his characteristics change over the course of the movie, some of his funniest scenes are with minor players who barely share the screen with him, including brisk piano teacher Barbara (Marian Seldes) and dorky dog owner Jacob (Richard Kind).

While the romance that unfolds between him and Mouna is touching, his friendship with the emotionally open Tarek is more significant, as this is the relationship that has such a lasting effect upon his outlook on life. Though the movie does not provide a neat Hollywood ending, it does make it clear just how profound Tarek's impact has been.

Aside from one outburst near the beginning of the movie, there's very little profanity or violence in this PG-13-rated film. It deals with a complex issue, but The Visitor is primarily a story of unlikely friendships among a quartet of people who are, in one way or another, visitors.