Prisons in the Mind and in Queens: Some Thoughts on The Visitor

      Last night I settled into bed with The Visitor, Tom McCarthy’s critically lauded film that touches on among other things, immigration in a post-9-11 world. The film follows economics professor Walter Vale as he breaks free from his self-imposed prison of decorum, and the bored, fuddy-duddy identity he has cultivated for himself, presumably since the death of his wife, a well-known classical pianist. Early on we see him struggle at a piano lesson—an attempt to shake off the shackles of boredom. However, his teacher is concerned more with form than with music, and Walter ends the lesson, frustrated. The twin jailors Form and Tedium follow him even in this halfhearted venture to hold on to his connection with his wife.
      It’s only when a forced trip to NYC takes him back to his small apartment in the East Village do we begin to see the prison walls break down. Walter finds that the Manhattan apartment he keeps but rarely visits has been surreptitiously rented to Tarek, a drummer from Syria, and Zainab, his Senegalese girlfriend, who sells handmade jewelry at flea markets. Seeing them thrown out on the street stirs a hint of compassion in him, and he invites them to back into his apartment and unwittingly, into his life.
      Tarek, warm, open and compassionate, strikes up a friendship with Walter and soon is giving him drum lessons. For what turns out to be Walter’s final lesson, Tarek takes him to a drum circle in Central Park. The documentary-like camera work of Oliver Bokelberg gracefully captures the unbridled joy and love of the characters and drummers for the spontaneous feel of the music. The energy flows off the screen and strikes a similar emotional note with the audience--much in the same way as the wedding procession in Rachel Getting Married. Both are similar in their shedding of form and traditional visual narration in favor of emotion and spirit. In this moment, in both films, the characters are free of the constraints, responsibilities, emotions and failures of life. However, this utopia can’t last forever. Minutes later, Tarek is wrongfully accused by the police of jumping a turnstile in the subway and is taken to a detention center in Queen. It turns out that Walter’s new friends are in the country illegally.
      In the second half of the movie, Walter’s metaphorical prison walls are succeeded by the physical prison keeping Tarek from the life he once lived, and loved, in New York. And here is where the film’s smallness, its subtleness in storytelling and its deflection of big phony displays of emotion, shed light on the larger issue: immigration in a post 9-11 world. The quiet beauty and tragedy is that as one man’s life begins again, another’s is cut short. More so than any news story I’ve read, this, for me, has put a human face on the immigration issue. Granted, it’s a story that is biased, but it never becomes obvious or sentimental. In its lack of melodrama and the near complete absence of crying, yelling, and histrionics, The Visitor has made an issue that tends to be addressed in black and white by the media much more honest and complex. In the end, the audience is left with mixed emotions; a warmth and affinity for the freed Walter Vale, and a feeling of guilt and melancholy for the visitors who helped free him, and who are repaid with loss and exile.