对话文本:(系普特网友整理，文本只包括旁白影评部分，不包括电影原声。)

The Visitor is the second film written and directed by Tom McCarthy. The first was The Station Agent. In this film, Richard Jenkins plays a professor of economics named Walter Vale. He is a widower and he's kind of reached a point in his life where he is a little bit bored, maybe a little depressed. He doesn't seem to be acutely in mourning for his wife but seems to be adrift and subject to a kind of ennui.

That changes in a rather abrupt and unexpected way when he comes down to New York, where he keeps an apartment that he never really goes to and finds that two people are living there unbeknownst to him. They are Tarek, a young man from Syria and his girlfriend, Zainab who is from Senegal.

Zainab and Tarek are in this country illegally and they support themselves by doing various artistic things. She makes jewelry that she sells in flea markets. He plays the drums in jazz clubs, also in subway stations and the Central Park.

First Walter is understandably appalled to find these people living in his apartment. But he kind of gets to like them and he feels a little bit of compassion for them. And he and Tarek, in particular, strike up a friendship and Tarek even teaches him to play the drums.

Now the story that The Visitor tells could have been a very sentimental predictable one about an uptight square white guy who meets these two soulful people from the third world and is sort of loosened up and gets in touch with himself through his friendship with them. And it is that story but the thing is that Tom McCarthy's direction is very subtle and unsentimental, a little bit dry, but in the best way just lets the story and the characters kind of take shape and unfold against the backdrop of New York.

And the main thing that makes this movie, I think, really special, in spite of some of its limitations is the performance of Richard Jenkins .I would also mention the performance of Hiam Abbass, a Palestinian actress who plays Tarek's mother who shows up later in the film.

But it is really Richard Jenkins as Walter who gives a very quiet, understated restrained performance as a man who's fundamentally decent but repressed, a little out of touch with his own emotions, who changes. He doesn't change in a dramatic, transformational overdone Hollywood way, but the way that people actually change by noticing things about himself and by slightly correcting some of his views of other people. And it's really his performance and this character that make The Visitor such a satisfying and interesting movie.

ennui: weariness of mind caused by lack of anything interesting or exciting to do; feeling of boredom unbeknownst: happening or existing without the knowledge of someone specified ― usually used with to

flea market: 跳蚤市场