By Fran Dorf —

Grief is both the thematic underpinning and the overarching aura in this low key, but absorbing and powerful film.  Although humanistic and realistic, the film is suffused with memories of the dead, which loom over the characters like silent watchful ghosts.

Written and directed by Tom McCarthy, The Visitor explores issues of identity and place, belonging and connection, and immigration and other post 9/11 issues, but it primarily revolves around a bereaved economics professor named Walter Vale, played by Richard Jenkins, the subtle actor who memorably played the ghostly Fisher father in my all-time favorite television series, Six Feet Under.

Jenkins literally inhabits this character, and while the circumstances of his musician wife’s death are never specified, he carries the heavy weight of grief in his hunched shoulders and furrowed brow, as he goes about his professorial life, which has lost all meaning for him. When circumstance forces Vale to present a paper at NYU, he finds a pair of young, undocumented squatters at his long unused Village apartment, Tarek, a Syrian musician and his Senaglese girlfriend, Zainab, and begins a kind of comeback.

A warm and paternal relationship develops between him and Tarek, and Tarek introduces him to African drumming and the New York City jazz scene. Particularly powerful are a scene in which this balding white man in a suit joins in a drumming circle in Washington Square Park, and the scenes between Vale and Tarek’s mother, who arrives when Tarek is detained by the authorities.  This woman is also burdened by grief over the death of her government-murdered Syrian husband, and the relationship is believable and adult, the rare vision of an astute director who although young understands these two grieving people who reach out to each other. The Visitor is memorable for its deep understanding that the journey back from grief is composed of small, often unexpected steps rather than a giant leap, but also for its wide open embrace of all manner of life.

Fran Dorf’s acclaimed, internationally published novels include A Reasonable Madness (1990/91), Flight (1992/93), and Saving Elijah (2000), which was inspired by the tragic death of Fran’s son, Michael, in 1994. AAn experienced public speaker and active philanthropist, Fran blogs as THE BRUISED MUSE on life, grief, and everything in between (books, film, art, writing, psychology, culture, human rights, politics, media, poetry, spirituality, etc) at www.frandorf.com.