Dir. Tom McCarthy, US, 2007, 106 mins
Cast: Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbas, Haaz Sleiman
Review by Carol Allen
Tom McCarthy, whose debut film The Station Agent impressed with its originality and integrity, achieves the same standard in this small scale and very enjoyable film,
Walter (Jenkins) is a widowed college professor in the suburbs, who seems to have lost the will to engage in life. He teaches the same old lectures over and over again, is taking piano lessons in a half hearted manner and in Jenkins' subtle performance you can sense the man's dried out quality, his isolation and inflexibility. Walter reluctantly agrees to go to New York to deliver a lecture but when he arrives at the small Manhatten apartment he keeps but rarely uses, he finds it has been illegally sub let by a con man to a young couple, Tarek (Sleiman), a drummer from Syria, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend. Despite his initial dismay Walter's basic compassion takes precedence and he invites them to stay for while, until they can find other accommodation. While Zainab remains withdrawn and suspicious of their host, Tarek, a delightful young man with a great enthusiasm for life, offers to teach Walter the drums. Their scenes together with Walter cautiously thawing as their friendship develops have a lovely warm humanity, while the drumming they do together is brilliantly foot tapping.
But Tarek and Zainab are illegal immigrants and one day Tarek falls foul of an officious subway official and finds himself in a detention centre. The politely menacing and inhumane face of authority and the whole immigration issue with its racist, post 9/11 paranoia, which forms the background to this area of the film, is uncomfortable, thought provoking and inspires us with both sympathy and a sense of the injustice of the situation. At this point Tarek's mother Mouna (Abbas) appears on the scene in search of her son and a cautious, restrained and delicately handled romance starts to grow between her and Walter.
The strength of this film is not so much in its simple but somewhat predictable plot but in the warmth and believability of its characters, whom we really care about and the performances of the actors, who play them. Abbas gives Mouna an impressive quiet dignity setting off her mature beauty, while Jenkins' performance is the sort of unobtrusively perfect one, which deserves the acknowledgement of awards. And although the story itself is in many ways a sad one, it is at times engagingly comic in its telling.
|
