THE VISITOR ssss Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy With Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira, and Hiam Abbass
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Perversely, both movies are about men who can’t connect. Fin McBride, the brooding dwarf in The Station Agent, is so fed up with people’s humiliating reactions to him that when he unexpectedly inherits a disused railroad station in rural New Jersey, he retreats into it like a monk. Still the world dogs him: the local convenience store owner rudely snaps his picture, and the local librarian is so startled by him that she yelps and drops a stack of books. McCarthy wrote the role for Peter Dinklage, whom he’d directed in a play years earlier; even so, it required a strong acting commitment. “Dink is one of the funniest guys I know,” McCarthy told usedwigs.com. “We really had to strip him down. That’s tough for an actor, especially someone like Peter who has used his sense of humor to get through life…. [Fin] doesn’t want to be charming, he doesn’t want to be flirty, he doesn’t want to be sarcastic. He really just wants to be left alone.” Dinklage gives a remarkably controlled performance; there’s a lifetime of pain in his mild remark that he doesn’t like bars.
McCarthy achieves a similar alchemy in The Visitor with Richard Jenkins, for whom he wrote the role of Walter Vale, a middle-aged economics professor grappling with the death of his concert pianist wife. Like Fin, Walter wants the world to go away: he blows off his students, zones out at departmental meetings, and listens to his wife’s CD while cooking spaghetti sauce to be eaten alone. When his Connecticut university sends him to New York to deliver a paper, he arrives at the apartment he and his wife kept there for years and finds an immigrant couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), have been conned into renting the place. They quickly agree to clear out, but Walter takes pity on them and invites them to stay for the time being.
I’m not surprised to learn that this element of the story also grew out of a personal connection. In his research for the movie McCarthy got involved with the Sojourners, an outreach program at Riverside Church in New York, and spent about a year visiting detainees at a center in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. One was a Nigerian man who’d been in detention for three and a half years and asked McCarthy to help process his deportation case so he could return to his native land. “I kept visiting him, trying to do what I could,” McCarthy told ifc.com. “You get very involved. I’d find myself visiting him on holidays, or leaving Manhattan early from work to go see him. You know, it’s someone you care about.” He might be speaking for Walter, but he might as easily be speaking for the viewer who forms an attachment to his characters. The best movies are like a visit you wish would never end.v
