The Visitor

I liked the first half of Tom McCarthy’s film a lot. The story of the transformation of a rather dyspeptic, white middle-class academic through his unintended exposure to raw musical vibrancy is charmingly realized. Perhaps the oppositions are a little too clearly drawn – bitter, withdrawn rationalist against optimistic, life-affirming intuitive; comfortable middle class complacency against vulnerable refugee anxiety, Christian America against the Muslim Middle East, and so on – but the lead performances by Jenkins and Sleiman (Danai Gurira’s Zainab, Tarek’s Senegalese girlfriend is a relatively peripheral presence) are effective and manage to carry off the touching, albeit rather rosy-hued story of friendship and awakening.

However, about mid-way through the film, after Tarek has been incarcerated as an illegal alien and Walter is home alone, there’s a knock on the latter’s door. My heart sank when it opened to reveal Hiam Abbass as Mouna, Tarek’s mother. What are the chances that Ma would be, not a big-hipped matron with a couple of giant shopping bags and a wart on her chin the size of a sultana, but an elegantly beautiful, well-dressed, completely Westernized-looking woman? That she would be gracious and graceful, capable and self-composed, a veritable Madonna (the ideal woman not the raunchy pop-tart). Not high, you might with justice say. What are the chances that she would end up in the sack with Walter (albeit platonically)? Not exactly Tattslotto territory but we’re getting there.

If the first half of the film establishes itself as a likeable and reasonably believable attempt to de-demonize the illegal immigrant, why would you, if you had the goal of critiquing the insulated complacency of the dominant order, fall back into the persuasively comforting arms of mainstream conventions? The problem is that McCarthy is concerned over-much with the tidily symbolic and not enough with the messily real. If this tendency to Hollywood’s familiar broad strokes is kept in check in the first half of the film, in the second half it completely overwhelms proceedings – not only do the clichés of American democracy get rolled out, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, the Stars and Stripes and Broadway (Walter takes starry-eyed Mouna to Phantom of the Opera) and the now-obligatory references to 9/11 attacks, but we get Midnight Express-like visits to the detention centre which is staffed by passive-aggressive African-Americans, now apparently the henchmen of the established order and opposed to the kindly Muslim short-order cook in the nearby café, whilst Mouna suffers on the sidelines with patient, dignified nobility and gratefully cleans Walter’s windows looking like she’s in a TV ad for Windex.

Although the issues that The Visitor addresses are unquestionably of value, McCarthy’s approach to them is overly-sentimentalized and in the final wash-up, rather limp. Thus, one asks, what is the final scene, with Walter playing his drum in the New York subway, about? – has he lost his mind and become a street crazy? It seems unlikely, but he certainly is not using his considerable skills and abilities and solid social standing to do anything to help Tarek or people like him. Had McCarthy played this story as an off-beat romance, much as was his 2003 film, The Station Agent, it might have been as winning an effort and lost none of its compassion, but as a straight “social conscience” film it is punching in the lightweight division.

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