Tom McCarthy, 2008 (9*)
Once in a blue moon, you get an excellent little indie film, like The Visitor, with powerful performances by the entire cast. Richard Jenkins, an overlooked character actor (he played the dead father’s ghost on cable tv's Six Feet Under), received a well-deserved Oscar® nomination for best actor for his best career role, as a professor of emerging economies named Walter.

Director Tom McCarthy (Central Station) has written an intelligent and emotionally gripping screenplay about the plight of immigrants here, especially Muslims, affected severely by the backlash created by the 9/11 disaster. The story also shows how people can still mange to communicate and understand each other in spite of different backgrounds, in this case using music as the common link.

Jenkins as Walter, goes to New York City to give an academic paper, which he's not the least interesting in doing, and when he arrives at his seldom-used apartment, a young couple is living there, scammed by someone for the rent: a man, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman in his first role), a djembe (hand-made west African goatskin drum) drummer from Syria, and his girlfriend, a street vending jewelry-maker from Senegal. Walter befriends the couple after they willingly leave and allows them to stay until they can find a place. Walter, whose wife was a classical pianist but he lacks the talent, begins drumming with Tarek’s tutelage, and later tries to help Tarek with his immigration status.

The actress Hiam Abbass (Munich) is especially touching as Tarek’s mother, who shows up from Michigan to help her son, and grudgingly becomes friends with Walter. This is well-done all around, not sentimental or mundane in the least, and uses drumming as a metaphor for the universality of the heartbeat and a method of non-verbal communication between different cultures.