Movie Review

Director/ writer; Tom McCarthy, Starring Richard Jenkins (Walter Vale), Haaz Sleiman (Tarek), Danai Gurica (Zainab), Hiam Abbass (Mouna), Amir Arison (Shah), 103 minutes, PG 13, 2007

When we first meet Walter he is not a very attractive guy. He's clearly depressed. Later we learn that his wife has recently died. He's a grumpy professor of Economics at a college in Connecticut. He's difficult with colleagues, strict and unyielding with students; he's even rude to his piano teacher. Reluctantly he yields to pressure from the head of his department and goes to New York (NYU) to deliver a paper that he has coauthored (basically lent his name to a junior colleague). When he arrives at his coop apartment in New York (he's a rich, white, liberal dude with a big house in Connecticut and a seldom used apartment in Manhattan) he discovers that two illegal immigrants have been living in it for months. Tarek is a Syrian, a poor Muslim and a jazz musician who gets gigs playing African drums in small clubs. Zaina, his girlfriend ('a good Muslim') is from Senegal and makes her way selling jewellery in the subway.

When they get over the shock of realizing they are both victims of a rental scam, Walter does the decent thing and offers to let them stay until they can make new arrangements. One day, after Tarek introduces Walter to a Drum Circle in Central Park and Walter begins to show that he can loosen up a bit. As they are traveling through the subway, Tarek is stopped by police in plain clothes and taken off to a detention centre. What a mess! He's an illegal who has lived in the US for a number of years and appears not to have seen a crucial notice that arrived at his mother’s house in Michigan (she threw it away). Zainab cannot visit him in detention for fear of being caught herself.

Walter visits Tarek daily in the giant warehouse that is the detention centre. He assumes that a bureaucratic mistake has been made and it will be straightened out soon. He avoids going back to Connecticut, arranges for an immigration lawyer, Shah, ("everything is different now, since 9/11") to take the case and in general acts shocked and despairing that his comfortable liberal view of his country could be so upset by the arbitrary, fearful and self righteous behaviour of the post 9/11 USA. Then, to add intrigue, Tarek's mother, Mouna, shows up from Michigan unannounced. She stays with Walter and a very restrained and decorous romance develops between them. Walter comes out of his shell and is able to admit to himself that he has been coasting unproductively in his prestigious job. He even takes off his tie!

One day, they suddenly discover that Tarek has been deported back to Syria! Mouna makes the decision that she must return there to be with her son, even though they both know that she will not be able to return to the US. The ending to this story is very European, very ironic; there is no resolution to the love story(s); no release for the prisoner. When last we see Walter, he has taken a leave of absence from his department and is playing his drum in the subway; a symbolic protest to the unfairness of the arbitrary and fearful system that has stolen his new friends and a physical symbol of his spiritual epiphany to abandon his uptight Life of the Ego.

This is a humorous and touching story in which the personal spiritual journey of the bitter and depressed Walter evolving into a conscious and soulful person is intertwined with a political critique of the loss of soul of the US, as it became consumed by "security concerns."

Thomas Merton presciently shows the intersection of those two worlds in a quote from the book "Honorable Reader."

It is true, political problems are not solved by love and mercy. But the world of politics is not the only world and unless political decisions rest on a foundation of something better and higher than politics, they never do any real good. When a country has to be rebuilt after war, the passions and energies of war are no longer enough. There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build and the will to forgive, the will to reconciliation.