..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
The Visitor
Directed byTom McCarthy
You’ve probably seen Tom McCarthy in a film or a television series. He plays a lot of best friends and neighbors. People that pop into a story to provide a plot detail and then gracefully bow out of the picture.
A couple of years ago McCarthy cobbled together the money to make The Station Agent, a difficult to describe tale of three eccentrics/misfits that somehow find each other and evolve into what some have described as a nuclear family. It won a prize at Sundance and was a success d’estime. McCarthy probably received offers to make dumbed down pictures with movie stars on the heels of The Station Agent and was either sufficiently shrewd to say “no” or fortunate that for whatever reason the deals fell through.
McCarthy’s second feature, The Visitor, is about as perfect a film for what it is - an intimate parlor piece about a character that suddenly finds circumstance has overtaken his life. In this instance it’s a recently widowed professor teaching in Connecticut who quite unexpectedly finds two people living in his Manhattan apartment when he returns to the city. They was scammed by somebody but the prof let’s them stay on for a bit and the two, a Lebanese musician and a Senegalese designer of jewelry, provide him with new meaning to his life.
One can kind of see where it’s heading in certain respects; and in other ways it’s quite surprising.
