RCRD LBL

The Visitor is this year’s little film that could. It's based on a true story in which two very unlikely paths cross in the megalopolis that is NYC.  A middle aged and bored Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins/Six Feet Under) comes home one day to find two new residents in his apartment: Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian man, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend. Learning that they're victims of a real estate scam, he befriends them and allows them to stay.

Moved by this, Tarek, a drummer, insists on teaching Walter to play the African drum. The instrument captures Walter's spirit and so begins a friendship between the two men. The differences in culture, age and temperament disappear.

In what can only be described as a dark twist, Tarek is pulled up by the NYPD on the Metro after returning with Walter from a lunchtime drum circle practice. Tarek is arrested as an undocumented citizen and held for deportation. As the situation moves from bad to worse Walter departs his sedentiary existence and enters the brutal world of immigration deportation policy and detention centers.

What's interesting in this film, apart from the inside look at immigration policy and it's systemic deployment after 9/11, is the film's sophisticated and special use of music. As the central characters get to know each other through playing music, both of the characters undertake a transformation. Music is used as a method to communicate and as a way to cross language and emotional barriers. The score to the film is created by Polish born Jan A.P. Kaczmarek and lends the film a soft and gentle side to the harsh realities undergoing Tarek. But the director Tom McCarthy (Station Agent/The Wire) doesn't stop there, in using “Je'Nwi Teni” (Don't Gag Me) by Fela Kuti as their drum practice song and as the only song in the film, the director is more than judicious with his use of music and therefore makes its use all the more powerful. Somehow the use of this song reminds us of why we all share the same planet.