SFFF IV: The Visitor

Image via Indiewire

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. ~ The New Colossus

These hallowed words, engraved on the pedestal of New York's Statue of Liberty, are brought into sharp relief by Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor. In his endearing and provocative follow up to 2003's indie hit The Station Agent, McCarthy tackles the apathy brought on by grief and middle age, in a textured allegory of post-9/11 America.

Images via The Visitor

Richard Jenkins, best known as the ghostly presence in Six Feet Under, here plays college economics professor Walter Vale, drifting through life after the death of his pianist wife, until a conference returns him to his New York apartment and its squatter residents. Like The Station Agent, McCarthy throws together some unlikely friends, this time Syrian drummer Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). Walter takes pity on them, allowing them to stay in his flat and in turn Tarek reintroduces music into Walter's life, in the guise of the African drum.

The film turns on the arrest of Tarek in the subway and his subsequent incaceration in a detention centre. His worried mother, Mouna (the beautiful Hiam Abbass) arrives in search of her son and Walter assumes the role of visiting Tarek as illegal immigrants Mouna and Zainab cannot.

I don't mean to give the whole story away here, as the plot is really secondary to the wonderful characters and amazing performance of Jenkins in particular. And while the immigration issues remain very topical in America as well as here here in Australia, The Visitor, for me at least, was more about the wretched and tempest-tossed Walter, and his journey to breathe free.