The Visitor (15)
Star rating: ****
Dir: Tom McCarthy
With: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Hiam Abbass

UNLIKE almost every picture released these days, The Visitor arrives with the minimum of fuss. It will not blow your mind, make you laugh till it hurts, mow your lawn or do anything else movies with megabucks marketing budgets promise to do. But in its own tender way, Tom McCarthy's drama is a quietly wonderful piece of work. Life won't change as a result of seeing this movie, but it will feel several hundred watts brighter.

In keeping with the film's low-voltage vibe is its no-profile star. You'll know the face, the past roles (Intolerable Cruelty, Hannah and Her Sisters, TV's Six Feet Under among many others) while struggling to name Richard Jenkins. McCarthy's picture, a hit at the Sundance and Edinburgh film festivals, should remedy that. (And if not, Jenkins is also in the forthcoming Coen brothers caper, Burn after Reading).

Cinema's quiet man plays widower Walter Vale, a economics professor living in Connecticut who is in a personal and professional slump. Still grieving over his wife, Walter moves through the days under his own personal weather system. In Walter's world, the forecast is always grim. A trip back to New York, and a stay in the apartment he once shared with his wife, is the last thing he wants.

Not that he has much time to dwell on this after opening the door. In the kind of Goldilocks scenario every householder dreads, someone has been sleeping in his bed and eating at his table while he's been away. The young foreign couple who have sublet the apartment are as shocked to see him as he is them.

At this point comes what might eventually become known as a typical McCarthy moment.

The Station Agent, his only previous film as a writer-director (like Jenkins, he has an acting CV as long as Sunset Boulevard), featured a cast of offbeat characters who were kept busy doing nothing. In the early, slow stages McCarthy asked the audience to take a lot on trust, and in the end he delivered a lovely picture. The same deal goes for this film.

The McCarthy moment comes when Walter, after initially being glad to see the back of the couple, allows them to stay on in his apartment with him. What seems an unbelievable gesture on his part is the key to understanding the character and the film. Turn down the cynicism a notch, McCarthy is saying, and let's see what happens.

Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) hails from Syria, his girlfriend Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira) from Senegal. She is quiet and wary, a jewellery maker. He's open, generous, easygoing and a musician. Seeing him on his instrument of choice, an African drum, makes it even more incredible that Walter doesn't send him packing. Among possible house guests, a drummer has to rank alongside a heavy metal-loving kleptomaniac prone to nude sleepwalking. But the two men click and Walter starts to take lessons from Tarek, both in drum playing and adopting a more relaxed attitude to life.

Walter's specialist area is the economics of the developing world. Ditto Tarek and Zainab, although their experience is rather more practical. They are a tiny part of those poor and huddled masses, yearning to breathe free and make a few bucks in the world's richest economy. The United States they've landed in is a very different place from the one that might have embraced their parents and grandparents, however. When this post-9/11 America opens the door, it keeps the safety chain on.

When Tarek has a run-in with the authorities, it's Walter's turn to become the stranger in a strange land. In trying to help Tarek he comes into contact with the young man's mother (another exquisite performance from Hiam Abbass) and a side of America he has never known. This citizen of the planet's most powerful nation begins to feel powerless. "It's very black and white now," a lawyer tells him. "Either you belong or you don't."

The Visitor wears its liberal heart on its sleeve. Its politics are obvious and predictable, and the characters of Tarek and Zainab are a tad two-dimensional. Yet there's also an impressive subtlety at work here, particularly in the performances. Jenkins is excellent, keeping his gas on a low peep for the first part of the picture, then slowly increasing the heat. His scenes with Abbass are beautifully judged. Grown-up people acting in grown-up, believable ways. Sometimes it happens in movies.

Just as Tarek is a symbol of the developing world, so Waler embodies decent, liberal, welcoming America, the side of that great nation that's been overshadowed these past eight years. The Visitor is a chance to get reacquainted with it, and to meet a director going places. McCarthy might have turned in a painstakingly modest picture, but this mouse of a movie has a roar of fellow feeling at its heart.