Widower Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is college economics professor living in suburban Connecticut. Reluctantly, he agrees to fill in for a pregnant colleague at a conference in New York, arriving back to the apartment he still owns but hasn’t visited since his wife’s death with a heavy heart and wish to be anywhere else but at this particular front door.

Richard Jenkins and Hiam Abbass in Overture Films' The Visitor

His malaise is short-lived, however, the moment he goes through the threshold and discovers immigrants Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira) illegally renting his flat. The victims of a vicious scam, Walter can’t throw the loving couple out on the street deciding instead to let them stay until they can make other arrangements. After a while, the men strike up an unassuming friendship, and while his girlfriend disapproves the Syrian refugee begins to pride in the fact he’s helping this quiet and unassuming man of numbers happily burst forth from inside his shell.   

After a tragic misunderstanding lands Tarek in a holding facility for illegal immigrants, Walter takes it upon himself to take the lead fighting for his new friend’s freedom. It is a burden and a hardship, but somehow the accountant does what he can to manage, even paying for the lawyer to help with the case right out of his own pocket. But when Tarek’s mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass) comes to New York to find out what is going on with her son, Walter discovers the whole affair is far more complicated then he’d fist imagined and that his life, as simple as it was, will no longer ever be the same.

With The Visitor, writer and director Thomas McCarthy has followed up his 2003 winner The Station Agent with a work of such staggeringly poetic genius I almost don’t know where to begin. A simple story told with an eye for detail, nuance and intelligence, this subtly engrossing drama is an astonishing delight. By the time it was over, the film left me quite literally speechless, the only question really being if I’d brought enough tissues to soak up all of my gloriously cascading tears.

Veteran character actor Jenkins, in a role conceived just for him, is superb. Always a strong presence in films good (The Kingdom, Changing Lanes), bad (Random Hearts, Cheaper by the Dozen) and brilliant (Flirting with Disaster, The Witches of Eastwick), McCarthy gives him the spotlight, the actor digging so deeply into Walter’s complicatedly fractured core it’s impossible not to be impressed. This is as intricately layered and emotionally vulnerable a portrait as any I’ll likely see this year, and to say’s he’s deserving of an Oscar nomination right here and now would be something akin to a colossal understatement.

Not that this is going to be an easy sit for everyone. With immigration reform such a hot-button issue right now any picture having the guts to tackle the topic is going to face immediate questions regarding which side of the political fence it stands. With heated opinions on both sides, I imagine people will bring in their own preconceptions about what story should be told and how it should be delivered before even entering the theater, that divisive predisposition probably the biggest obstacle the drama is going to face.

McCarthy cleverly circumvents this issue by making The Visitor an intimately human tale of an outsider awakening back to his own soul and conscience. Walter is a wounded man, some would even say he’s broken beyond repair, but this friendship with Tarek and the subsequent fight to keep in the U.S. with the man’s mother revitalizes him and opens his eyes to the spectacular wonders the world has to offer. While elements of this are sad, at times even downright devastating, the film is ultimately a beating drum signaling the arrival of hope and inspiration. 

That’s a rhythmic cadence everyone can relate to, and while the immigration issue is front and center the filmmaker never beats us over the head with didactic shouts of indignation and instead allows the audience to make up their own minds about the rights and the wrongs of what they’ve seen. If anything, only a single moment near the end at the detention center feels forced and false, too preachy and in your face to work as the director probably wishes it would. Otherwise this is a marvelous journey with nary a false note magnificently acted by its leads and full of subtle graces impossible to forget, The Visitor an April guest well worth welcoming with enthusiastically open arms.

Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)

- Review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle

Additional Links:

-  Interview with actor Richard Jenkins by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  The Visitor Theatrical Trailer