Posted on Thu, May. 01, 2008

“The Visitor” scrupulously eschews big dramatic moments, yet this film packs a terrific wallop that will leave viewers unwilling (or unable) to immediately get to their feet as the final credits roll.

Many a movie huffs and puffs without generating a 10th of the emotion of Thomas McCarthy’s sophomore effort, the low-key tale of a man who at age 60 finally discovers his passion. (It opens today at the Tivoli.)

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins, the character actor who portrayed the dead dad in HBO’s “Six Feet Under”) teaches economics at a Connecticut college — or at least he goes through the motions. He has taught the same class for 20 years, his students bore him and he takes no joy from his job.

Which is not to say he’s miserable. He seems to have striven for — and finally achieved — a state in which he doesn’t feel much of anything.

Required to present a paper at a conference in NYC, Walter enters the Greenwich Village apartment he has rented since before his wife’s death. There he finds the Syrian émigré Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). The young couple are victims of a con man who illegally rented to them what he knew was a rarely occupied apartment.

They make haste to vacate, but Walter, taking pity, invites them to stay a few days until they can relocate.

A few days turn into a friendship.

Tarek is an outgoing soul who plays the African drum and introduces Walter to the instrument. At first hesitantly, then with more abandon, the professor lets his fingers do the talking.

“Don’t think about it,” Tarek advises. “Thinking just screws it up.”

McCarthy’s excellent screenplay pivots on Tarek’s arrest and the revelation that he and Zainab are illegals. Energized by concern for his new friend, Walter hires an immigration lawyer lest Tarek become just one more nameless cog in an impersonal legal machine.

A late but important arrival on the scene is Tarek’s worried mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), a luminous woman who arrives from Michigan and lives with Walter while her son’s case grinds through the system.

Learning that Tarek may be transferred without warning to one of several prisons for illegals scattered around the country, Mouna can only shudder at the memory of how her late journalist husband spent nearly a decade in prison.

“Just like Syria,” she observes.

At times “The Visitor” flirts with becoming a “problem picture,” the problem in this case being the plight of illegals like Tarek. But while McCarthy generates a good deal of indignation over the issue, he never loses sight of the film’s core, which is Walter.

In his first starring role after an acting career of 30 years, Jenkins does the near impossible by taking a man who hides his emotions and letting us see what’s going on beneath that bland exterior.

Jenkins has only one big scene — late in the film Walter goes ballistic at the impersonal cruelty of Tarek’s situation — yet he delivers an astonishingly rich performance, packed with insight, humor and feeling. It’s a performance of tiny grace notes that add up to an overwhelming whole.

The real subject here isn’t post-9/11 xenophobia but rather friendship, how it changes us, heals us and how the arbitrary intrusion of outside forces — in this case a government unconcerned with the fates of individuals — both threatens and strengthens us.

McCarthy, whose debut feature “The Station Agent” was one of the best films of 2003, gives us a story that works along predictable lines. Yet he somehow manages to surprise us time and time again. The film never breaks a sweat, yet it digs deeper into the psyches of its characters — and of those of us watching — than any recent film you could name.

By the time this movie reaches its bittersweet conclusion we’re so wrapped up in the lives on the screen that we forget they are fictional characters. It has been a long time since a “little” movie came out of nowhere to so effectively freshen our jaded cinematic sensibilities (in that regard “The Visitor” compares favorably with 2000’s “You Can Count on Me”).

Did I say “little”? Not in the things that matter.

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