John Cusack plays struggling writer, Jackson Curtis, who, since only selling 400 copies of his book, makes ends meet escorting high-profile, pompous foreigners to and from the airport in a limousine.  Amanda Peet plays his ex-wife, Kate Curtis, who’s about as hollow as characters get.  And her new squeeze is the cliched, dorky stand-in dad, Gordon Silberman, played by Tom McCarthy.  This love triangle is wrought with the usual fabricated tension and handled with clinical indifference.

The movie opens in 2009 and hurls towards the ominous 2012 within the first 15 minutes.  Jackson and his estranged family are thrust back together and forced to outrun/out-drive/out-fly the solar flares, or whatever they are, that the Mayans knew would be aiming to take out all of civilization as soon as all the planets align.  They do a lot of screaming, dodging explosions, and running from giant nefarious-looking dark clouds that look like The Nothing from “The Never Ending Story.”  They eventually encounter the US military that conveniently has several massive high-tech boats cleverly stored next to Mount Everest full of animals to propagate their respective species a la Noah’s Ark.

“2012″ is Emmerich’s “Goodfellas.”  Wait, hear me out on this one.  A lifetime of toiling in the abyss of the human psyche and the darkest recesses of murderous mafia networks finally led to Martin Scorsese’s fully-realized, near-perfect 1990 crime-drama masterpiece.  A lifetime of fascination with, thinking about, and filming things getting blowed up real good has finally led to Emmerich’s granddaddy of calamity, a fully-realized exercise in shameless, utterly inane destruction.  Look out Michael Bay, your movies may be poorly directed, racially insensitive, misogynistic, and instrumental in the mass de-evolution of society, but when it comes to senseless annihilation, you may have met your match.

At first blush The Visitor looks to sit squarely in the indie camp. The story follows Walter Vale, a middle-aged bespectacled economics professor who happens to be a widower. Still mourning his wife’s death, he attends an academic conference in New York City where he finds a young couple illegally inhabiting the seldom used apartment he keeps there. After some initial shock, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira)–a young Syrian and his Senegalese girlfriend–realize that they’ve been renting the place illegally, thanks to some mysterious huckster, and they pack up to leave. Walter takes compassion on them and invites them to stay. Drama ensues.

Just hearing the description you might wonder if a dryer, duller movie could possibly be made. But director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent) heads off boredom at the pass, never allowing it to show up. The relationships explored are genuinely meaty, but there’s a lightness about this film as well. There are plenty of well-earned laughs to be had as Walter learns to play the drums from Tarek and slowly tries to ingratiate himself with reserved Zainab. The film is sufficiently deep, but also fun enough to hold your interest. Visually, this character piece finds a way, through well-imagined cinematography, to feel large and substantial without sacrificing nuance.

The most treacherous but ultimately rewarding segment of the film deals with a scrape between Tarek and U.S. immigration officials. Amazingly, the relationships continue to lead, and the movie never devolves into an anti-Bush screed. And just when you think the Hollywood influence might rear its head, the beautifully unsullied ending arrives. The final fifteen minutes are neither sappy nor too hip for their own good.
There are several noteworthy performances here, and Richard Jenkins particularly owns the screen. But the real show stealer here is the story, which constantly walks the line between too much and not enough without ever slipping up.