"The Visitor" - review

Writer-director Tom McCarthy's first film "The Station Agent" is a subtle and disarming film about three disparate characters trying to connect and communicate.

It introduced future Game of Thrones fans to the talents of Peter Dinklage, and told a story about a little person that didn't focus solely on the fact that the main character is a little person.

"The Station Agent" was an auspicious debut, and McCarthy's follow-up "The Visitor", is an enthralling examination of the power of empathy and friendship set amidst turbulent and fractious global times.

Fans of "Six Feet Under" will immediately recognize Richard Jenkins as he played the dead-but-not-gone and wickedly wisecracking father figure of that series.

In "The Visitor", Jenkins is Walter Vale, an economics professor and widower who has been going through the motions for years.  His life is ordered, but it is without joy or meaning.

A chance encounter breaks the bonds of Walter's boredom and sets him on a new path to inspiration and joy.

Walter discovers Tarek and Zainab, a young, unmarried immigrant couple squatting in his often unused New York apartment.

It's unclear exactly how they were given keys to Walter's place, but he doesn't have the heart to throw them out in the street.  Instead, Walter finds himself drawn to the rhythms of Tarek's djembe drum.

Tarek begins to teach Walter, and the two men form a fast friendship while playing together in drum circles at Central Park.

Gloria Estefan was right!  The rhythm is gonna getcha, and it hooks Walter HARD.

He had been trying to learn piano because his late wife was an accomplished player with a library of CD recordings, but for Walter, the drum is the tool best suited to help him find his mode of self-expression.

But when Tarek is suddenly arrested by transit cops who wrongly believed him to be a fare jumper, Walter's new nirvana is threatened by the merciless application of law following the flood of immigrant fear after 9/11.

Tarek is taken to a holding facility, and Walter struggles to maintain his composure while navigating the legal nightmare of trying to prevent Tarek's deportation.

Walter's composure slowly crumbles while helplessly enduring the cold and callous treatment of his new friend, and this stress is somewhat alleviated by the appearance of Mouna, Tarek's mother.

Mouna cannot even visit Tarek for fear of being arrested herself because she is also living illegally in the United States.  As Walter and Mouna work together toward arranging Tarek's release, Mouna's beauty, grace, warmth and gentleness elicit feelings in Walter long neglected.

Their time together is sweet, cautiously flirtatious and achingly tender.

But even here, happiness is brief, as Zarek is suddenly deported without notice and Mouna decides that she must return home to Egypt to be with him.

Walter understands, but his newly stoked passions cannot be dampened so easily, so he takes his drum to the subway and begins to pound out his passion and anger for any who will hear.

"The Visitor" came out 6 years after 9/11, and it was a poignant and incisive criticism of the knee-jerk political and cultural reactions to that horrific event and the damage that they wrought upon countless families and friends.

Today, "The Visitor" has lost not one iota of its relevancy and significance in calling out the black-or-white dogmatism that often characterizes decisions made in haste and the heat of emotion and fear.

"The Visitor" is a beatific treatise on humanism, and the drumbeat of its intrinsic truth is impossible to resist.