Writer-director Thomas McCarthy's new film has a grander sweep than his first, The Station Agent, but it's still focused on the world's lost and lonely souls. He talks to Peter Calder
KEY POINTS:
The timing seems resonant to say the least. Writer-director Tom McCarthy takes a call from New Zealand in his SoHo apartment in New York City at 5pm on November 4. The polls are an hour from closing in the US presidential election that will announce the beginning of
the end of the Bush era and he is "glued to CNN, with all my fingers crossed".
The resonance of the moment comes because we are to talk about his new film, The Visitor. It's the story of an isolated, grieving academic whose life, to his considerable surprise, collides with the draconian policy of detention without legal process that has been a defining feature of post-9/11 America.
Walter Vale, played with unassuming grace by Richard Jenkins, reluctantly travels from his Connecticut home to Manhattan to present a paper at a conference. Arriving at the city apartment he keeps but rarely uses, he finds it has been illegally let to two illegal immigrants, Khalil (Haaz Sleiman), a Syrian, and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira) - both Muslims. The tentative friendship that develops between them brings Walter out of his shell - until the forces of the state intervene.
The film might be seen as a critique, delivered more in sorrow than in anger, of the kind of country the US has become, but McCarthy - whose first film, The Station Agent, caused ripples out of all proportion to its size - says that most of his compatriots don't know about the widespread detention, without charge or trial, that the US Government has been practising in their names. Guantanamo Bay may have entered the lexicon, but detention centres in
New York boroughs - within sight of Ground Zero - operate below the public radar.
"In the last eight years," he says, "a lot of things have been set up and perpetrated on behalf of the American people by our Government. Some we know about ... and some we don't.
"If there is a political message in the film, it is that of course there will be immigration laws, but it looks at the question of detention and asks, 'Can we do this better?' If we are going to preach about democracy around the world, we have to practise it at home
... I have great faith in the American people. When people are informed they can act responsibly."
The film's overarching irony, of course, is that America is a land created by immigration, but which, since 2001, has developed a fortress mentality. As comedian Robin Williams put it: "The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying, 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses'. She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'You want a piece of me?"'
"We are a nation of immigrants," says McCarthy, "and our greatest strength is our diversity. It has been the heart and soul of this country.
"If we are going to be a true democracy we have to practise what we preach. We can't lock people up for four years without any access to the outside world."
For all that, McCarthy says that he didn't set out to make a political film.
"I set out to make a movie about these characters and the story sort of became inevitable."
The film is notable for being the first starring role for Jenkins, a busy but unobtrusive actor who first registered on most people's radar as the ghostly father of the Fisher clan in television's Six Feet Under.
Though he's acted for everyone from Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters) to the Coen brothers (he pines for Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading) and New Zealand director Niki Caro (he was Charlize Theron's dad in North Country), he has always seemed a reliable journeyman rather than a main character.
Here, though, he nails it, with an unshowy but intelligent performance as a man who starts out wanting to disappear and ends up coming into focus - for himself and for us.
Directors always say that the actor they cast was the one they had always had in mind - even when he was what they ended up with when seven others passed - but in this case it's easy to believe McCarthy always wanted Jenkins. He approached him before he even started writing the screenplay (Jenkins willingly agreed to the part, but predicted McCarthy would never raise the money) and talked to him often while he was redrafting it.
"[Because of the success of The Station Agent], I had every name in Hollywood dangled in front of my face, but I wrote the role for Richard and I cast Hiam Abbas [the famous Israeli actress who plays Khalil's mother] before finishing the script."
McCarthy knew that casting a star in the Walter role would have sucked all the oxygen out of the ensemble.
"It would have tipped the boat. It would have weighted the story the wrong way to have a star playing an ordinary average Joe. I just don't believe that. I don't believe that Richard Gere is a plumber.
"With Richard [Jenkins] you get a guy who walks and talks the part of a guy you stand next to in the elevator and don't think twice about."
If there is any justice, Jenkins' name will feature at Oscar time. It would be a welcome blast of attention for a man who, McCarthy says, is conscious of how forgettable he is.
"We were doing some press interviews for the film in Chicago and he told me that several well-known film writers had said they had always been great admirers of his work. And I said, 'So what?' And he said, 'The thing is, I don't ever remember any of them ever writing anything about me'."
LOWDOWN
What: The Visitor, in cinemas now
Who: Tom McCarthy, director
