The Visitor

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Visitor made in 2007, released in 2008, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, starring Richard Jenkins.

Jenkins is one of those actors who has a long history of bit parts, supporting roles – accountants, businessmen, police detectives, lawyers, executives. Tall, balding, glasses, white. Here at last he gets a chance to star in a role with changes and some depth, and he does a good job and got an oscar nomination for it.

Story involves a Yale poli-sci professor whose life is stagnant. His wife died some years ago, his only son is living in London. He pretends he is working on a new book on globalization but in fact does nothing about it. He is a cold, mechanical, by-the-numbers professor. He puts his name on scholarly papers written by colleagues, as coauthor. He tries to take piano lessons (his wife was a gifted pianist) but he fires the teachers after one lesson … then some time later he takes another lesson with another teacher. He is closed off and repressed and has no joy.

Then he must go to New York to deliver a paper he supposedly coauthored, because the true author is sick. He protests and says he doesn’t want to go, but his department head says he has to.

Once in New York, he goes into his apartment there – the apartment he has owned for 25 years, but almost never visits anymore. He is shocked to find somebody is there – a black woman taking a bath; an Arab who comes and grabs him.

It’s a tense moment. But it turns out that this couple knows an ‘Ivan’ who claimed to own the apartment and sublet it to them. They leave, and the professor sits alone, and watches them through the window.

Finding they had left something behind, he takes it out to them – they are on the sidewalk phoning friends, trying to find someplace to stay that night. The professor in his cold stumbling manner invites them to stay in the apartment, at least for one night.

By day, the professor goes to his conference; by night, he sees the couple still in his apartment. She is from Senegal, he is from Syria; she makes jewelry, knitted bands and such, and sells them on the street in a small market where many such vendors set up tables. The Syrian is a drummer with a jazz band at a nightclub.

One day the professor comes home early and finds the guy practicing drumming. He tells him he can go on practicing, he won’t bother him. Another day the professor comes home and finds the drum there, and plays it a bit himself. The drummer finds him, and begins to teach him how to drum. Significantly, the drummer gives him his first two lessons as: ‘Don’t think’ and ‘Forget classical fourths, this is an African drum, you play in thirds.’ So this effectively wipes out the past, everything the man had built, everything that is holding him back.

Though the Senegalese woman never warms to the professor, the Syrian, who’s a very warm person, plays with him, takes him to drum circles in the park, invites him to come hear him play in night clubs. They are getting along very well. The professor delivers his paper at the conference, not very well, but it’s over, and yet he remains in New York, ignoring his classes. He and the drummer see a man playing a string instrument in the subway station, the drummer says he always wished he had the nerve to do that; maybe they should do it together and split the tips.

Then everything changes.

Trying to get the drums through the subway turnstile one day, the Syrian is challenged by the subway police. He paid, he insists he did pay, but they still notice his accent, and see the big bag he’s carrying (it holds his drum) and put him up against the wall. They look at his ID and take him in. The professor tries to protest, and they tell him if he doesn’t back off and shut up they will arrest him too.

As it turns out, both the Senegalese and the Syrian are illegals. He is taken to a detention center. She can’t visit him for fear they will detain her. Only the professor can go. So he visits the drummer every day. He gets a lawyer, who tries to help, but it’s all a maze of red tape and incomprehensible laws.

Then the Syrian’s mother shows up from Michigan. She too fears to go to visit her son. The professor is drawn into their problems more and more. He feels responsible, because the son was helping him to get through the turnstile when the subway police noticed him. Also he likes the kid. So he asks the mother to stay at the apartment in the son’s room.

The mother meets the girl from Senegal, and they warm to each other. But the lawyer seems not to be able to help. The son went to his hearing, but he never received the deportation notice, some official letter that he had to get before he could be legally deported. He never got it, and the mother swears also it never came. The lawyer tells them that if there was a mixup so the letter was not sent, they might have a chance; but if the letter was sent, there’s nothing anyone can do.

Meanwhile the professor is getting calls from Yale, asking him why he isn’t back teaching his class. He puts them off a couple times, then he must go. He goes back to his old life, which is meaningless. He faces this and acts. He goes on sabbatical, he sells his dead wife’s piano, and he gets new glasses. Then he goes back to New York.

He visits the boy again, but the boy is changed. Being in prison is having a bad effect on him. He’s short-tempered, frustrated, near breaking down. As it happens, the boy’s father was put in jail in Syria for articles he wrote for the newspaper. He spent 7 years in jail, then was released when he was very sick and died 2 months later. This is the great fear haunting the mother; the son notices that people in the detention center are disappearing. One or two at a time, they are gone in the morning and nobody knows where they are. They might be sent out of the country, they might be sent to another center. Even worse is the prospect of not leaving; the son knows one guy who has been in the center for 5 years.

For himself, and to cheer up the mother, the professor takes her to the theater, to see Phantom of the Opera whose music she loves and knows by heart. It is a wonderful evening for them both. The next morning the professor is awakened by a phone call from the son, they are taking him from the center but he doesn’t know why or where to.

Mother and professor rush to the detention center. The son is gone. Nobody knows where exactly he is but the word is that he has been deported. There is no way to reach him.

They go to tell the girl from Senegal. She is heartbroken over it.

Back at the apartment, the mother tells the professor she must go back to Syria for her son. Even though it means she herself will never be able to come back, she must go to be with him as soon as possible. And she confesses to the professor that in fact the deportation letter did arrive, it came to Michigan three years ago when she was living with her son, but she tore it up and threw it away, and never told her son. And as time went on she began to think that nothing would come of it. Now something has come of it.

The professor sees the mother off at the airport. Now he has nothing.

But he takes his drum and goes to the subway, and he plays the drum in the subway just as he and the boy spoke about. The final shot shows the professor, no jacket, no tie, playing the drum with abandon in the subway as half a dozen people stand by waiting for their trains.

It is well shot indie-style, New York style. Nothing spectacular, just trying to hold the composition and keep things in focus with low light in cramped apartments and on the street. Performances are restrained. The script is quite Hollywood though it would protest it’s nothing of the sort; all the same the contrast with Louis Malle’s films is striking. Here indeed we see the classical ‘man with a problem’ structure, and the solution is that he learns how to open up and live from the strangers in his apartment, but the price to them is that the couple is broken apart, and the boy and his mother are both back in Syria where, presumably, the government is hostile to them for the writings of the father. It almost seems callous, cruel, to see the professor liberated and enjoying his life at the end, when it has come at such a cost.

Many digs are aimed squarely at the immigration officials and the whole establishment and their incomprehensible laws. The secondary function of the movie is thus to introduce the American audience to what immigration feels like from ‘the other side.’ Indeed that might be the primary function of the film, but then in showing it around, in development, whatever – they brought the professor forward and decided to at least make his story reach a happier end.

A parallel is drawn between the state of the immigrants, without official permission in the country, and their state as we first find them, without official permission in the professor’s apartment. And he kicks them out – but after reflection he lets them stay, and learns from them, and grows from knowing them. Putting this parallel back around, we would then expect that the country would learn and grow had it only allowed them to stay.

The last shot didn’t feel cruel and callous when I was watching it, and so that’s the prime test. But in looking back at it and describing it to you, it feels that way to me now. I almost hate the professor for his liberation. Weird huh?

(13 March 2009)