Review: The Visitor

For me, Tom McCarthy's The Station Agent was almost like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape all over again. While the earlier movie opened my eyes (and I wasn't alone) to how fresh and different an American independent film could be, McCarthy's film 14 years later revealed a sweet sensibility that seemed to have been missing in the independent movement Soderbergh had inspired. Let's face it, Sex, Lies was kind of a creepy movie at times, and however much quirky character-driven comedy/dramas such as Heavy and Ghost World may have been suffused with humanity, the genre tends to be more than a little dark. The Station Agent threw all that out the window, creating almost a fantasy world of human relationships that, while refreshingly realistic on one level, was also a bit like a train set. And who doesn't love a train set?

McCarthy's new film, The Visitor, is something like The Station Agent in reverse. Instead of leaving the city for a rural town where he doesn't seem to belong, the main character in the new film, Walter Vale, heads into New York City from the tidy Connecticut town where he teaches college economics. But like Finbar McBride in The Station Agent, Vale needs a change and finds it unexpectedly in his new surroundings.

The story is set in motion when Vale discovers someone has rented out the apartment he owns in Greenwich Village to a struggling immigrant couple. This isn't the first movie in which a WASPy middle-aged character has been caught up in the drama and joy of a world more "colorful" than his own, but the inevitable has seldom felt so emotionally honest and believable. As in The Station Agent, writer-director McCarthy builds up his characters slowly but surely and makes us cringe occasionally as they struggle to accommodate one another. What's refreshing about both films is that the stories don't really rely on great, reverberating confrontations. That leaves room for a lot more small observations of the sort that get drowned out in too many current films.

Like the diminutive Finbar in the earlier film, Vale isn't a typical lead character. So longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, who comes off like one of the less dynamic middle managers you might find at an office supplies company, is well suited to the role. He's a good foil for the energetic Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), the beautiful Zainab (Danai Gurira) and other indelible characters.

As befits a movie that sends a suburban recluse into the urban maelstrom, The Visitor is much more engaged with the outside world than was The Station Agent. That's both a strength and a weakness, as it gives a little more heft to McCarthy's storytelling but sometimes feels forced. Still, the focus here is on individual relationships, and there are no cardboard characters. The Visitor may not have quite the magic of McCarthy's earlier film, but he's given us another small gem with much the same sweet tone -- something the eclectic Soderbergh, for all his impressive achievements since Sex, Lies, has never done.