The movie is fine, but Richard Jenkins is a miracle. Richard Jenkins has 77 film and TV acting credits to his name since 1974. He’s best known as the father on Six Feet Under. He’s probably lurking in your favorite film, where you recognize his anonymous, impassive white-guy face but don’t know his name. Finally, he’s the star of something: the second film by Thomas McCarthy.

McCarthy’s first film, The Station Agent, was better. But it didn’t have Richard Jenkins in it. (I am continuing to repeat both his first name and his surname so that both you and I can learn them once and for all.) In The Visitor, Richard Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a lonely professor whose every nerve seems to have been disconnected from its source. He’s the walking dead—until he comes upon Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), two illegal immigrants who have been tricked into taking up residence in his usually vacant Manhattan apartment.

It’s a classic case of a white guy awakened from his slumber by the kiss of “exotic” others. He even takes up drumming with Tarek. At the pinnacle of all this harmony and cohabitation, Tarek is imprisoned by the immigration authorities, and the characters find themselves in the maw of the paranoid American bureaucracy.

None of this sounds particularly promising, but the writing is good, and then there is Richard Jenkins. He disappears in his scenes, which is a surprisingly powerful trick. It makes everything else brighter and more solid. He’s a big, fat negative capability (can a negative capability be big and fat?). In The Visitor, he is the visitor; Walter Vale is a guest in his own character. He never takes up residence, and yet he’s all you remember.

THE VISITOR DIR. THOMAS MCCARTHY | RATED PG-13 | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA

Tags: Film, Reviews, richard jenkins, six feet under, the visitor