A ‘Visitor’ among us

In "The Visitor," veteran supporting player Richard Jenkins makes a visit of his own - to the rarified territory of featured performer.

Jenkins has accumulated nearly 80 screen credits as a background fixture, usually a rangy, quietly stern authority figure - head of the law firm, judge, sheriff, etc.

Certain directors (the Coens in "Intolerable Cruelty") noticed Jenkins had a knack for being funny. They've cast him as an outwardly bland, middle-aged man whose wit and humor come as something of a surprise. David O. Russell captured it in "Flirting With Disaster," using Jenkins as a square-ish FBI agent who turns out to be gay.

So it's not a surprise, really, that Jenkins caught the eye of actor-turned-director Tom McCarthy, director of "The Visitor," and a guy with a knack for seeing potential in under-used actors.

McCarthy made a splash with the indie hit "The Station Agent," the portrait of an unlikely friendship between a reclusive midget (Peter Dinklage) and a blue-collar guy (Bobby Canavale) - both actors "popped," and have been very busy every since.

"The Visitor" has an entirely different subject (immigration), but a similar tone - a droll, episodic, often funny meditation on the evolving relationship between apparently dissimilar people.

Jenkins is Walter, a going-though-the-motions professor numbed by the death of his wife. The movie opens with Connecticut resident Walter entering his neglected New York apartment, where he finds some immigrant squatters - a Middle Eastern musician Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend (Danai Gurira).

He evicts them, then has a change of heart when he sees them standing on the street with no place to go. Walter needs an adventure in his life, a change (ideas that Jenkins wordlessly conveys), and so he changes his mind and asks them to return. Thus begins the quirky friendships on which the movie is built.

"The Visitor" is a little darker than "The Station Agent" - Walter's new immigrant friends may not be exactly legal, and that has ramifications. The plot has the newly energized Walter clashing with immigration officials over their citizenship.

It's been said that McCarthy's movie takes pains to be apolitical, but its point of view is hard to miss: "The Visitor" clearly sympathizes with the idea that it's unfair to switch from decades of lax enforcement to sudden, Draconian measures.

It wants sympathy for its immigrant characters: plucky, hard-working, resourceful people, impossible to dislike. And Walter is the complacent American whose eyes are opened to the injustice of their fragile hold on freedom and opportunity.

McCarthy, a quintessential indie filmmaker, clearly thinks this "human face" approach will win hearts and minds. If so, he misunderstands the hearts and minds of amnesty opponents like Congressman Tom Tancredo, spotted recently wearing a T-shirt that says "America is Full."

For the nonaligned, "The Visitor" is best enjoyed as a chance to see some new faces, or old faces like Jenkins', doing new things. *

Produced by Mary Jane Skalski, Michael London; written and directed by Tom McCarthy, distributed by Overture Films.