FILM REVIEW: The drummer and the good Samaritan

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Cross-cultural connections are a favorite of the movie business, but few get beyond more or less cynical toying with cultural stereotypes. The Visitor, which is about the unlikely friendship between a bitter college professor and a young Syrian musician, touches on issues such as immigration, post-9/11 ethnic paranoia, the need to connect not only with oneself but with others, and the liberating effects of ethnic music. It seems all set up to be just an updated version of Peter Weir’s cliche-ridden Green Card (1990). A combination of Thomas McCarthy’s tight script and excellent performances from the small cast ensure that it is nothing of the sort.

Walter Vale is a professor at a college in Connecticut who has lost his pianist wife and all interest in his work and his students. He reluctantly returns to New York to deliver a paper at a conference to find his apartment inhabited by Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian drummer and his girlfriend Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira), who sells handcrafted ornaments in a street market. McCarthy, who also wrote the script, handles the meeting of two cultures with enormous sensitivity, and also with a light touch, getting behind the surface of things. Vale’s courtesy to “the visitor” is largely the result of the emptiness of his own life and the self-sufficient lives of his middle-class neighbors. Zainab only slowly comes to accept Vale’s offers of assistance as anything more than a cruel deception, the product of America’s myth of its own universal benevolence.

McCarthy shows a brilliant aptitude of escaping the pitfalls in a format in which the temptations of cliche are so evident. While it is not much of a surprise that the free-spirited Tarek starts giving Vale drum lessons and helps him discover his long-smothered rhythm, McCarthy does not dwell on this and moves the story on quickly. Tarek gets picked up because of a minor misunderstanding in the subway and is soon in detention, awaiting deportation.

Drawn into Tarek’s troubles, Vale is brought face to face with an aspect of his world that is the dark side of the local color and the exciting sounds of a multicultural city.

A scene in which Vale is brought up hard against bureaucratic inertia that has always been his friend is perfectly gauged, and shows Richard Jenkins (best known perhaps from Six Feet Under) for the fine actor that he is. He is restrained from getting himself arrested by Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass), no stranger to being on the side of the government. “It is just like Syria,” she says, and there McCarthy is content to leave it.

Abbass gives a brilliant performance as Mouna Khalil, Tarek’s mother, and the establishment of a tender relationship with Vale carries the film to its conclusion. Whether this connection can be preserved, or whether a mix of fear, convenience and prejudice will bring it all tumbling down is left hanging in the air as the credits role. The questions that the film asks linger on like the reverberation of Tarek’s drums long after you leave the cinema.

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