The first thing I loved about "The Visitor" is how realistic it felt.

Walter (Richard Jenkins) is a widowed college professor who's been teaching the same economics classes for 20 years. He's just going through the motions and getting away with it by saying he is working on a book.

I suspect that there are many middle-class Americans living this sort of life alongside bosses and coworkers who are doing the same. I recognized Walter.

He teaches and lives in Connecticut but has kept an apartment that he shared with his wife in New York City. He hasn’t been to the apartment in a long time. She was a professional pianist and now he's trying to learn to play the piano. Otherwise, he lives a solitary, mostly quiet, life.

Then one day a colleague insists that Walter present a paper he co-authored at a conference in the city. He insists in such a way that Walter cannot refuse. Arriving at his New York City apartment he finds a woman in his bathtub.

Zainab (Danai Gurira) is from Senegal and her boyfriend, Tarek, (Haaz Sleiman) is from Syria. They say that they sublet the apartment two months earlier from a man Walter has never heard of. They immediately pack and say they'll go stay with friends, but Walter can tell they have nowhere to go. The three set up housekeeping.

This transition was the most amazing for me. Usually when people are faced with such a situation in movies there is all sorts of drama. There is a lot of screaming and then police are called. That was what I expected. That was my conditioned response.

Instead what happens here between Walter and Zainab and Tarek seems surprisingly natural. Director Tom McCarthy ("The Station Agent") gets it just right. I hope that real people would take care of each other put in this situation. I still hope, as old and jaded as I am, that, given an opportunity, people can make connections this easily.

Tarek is a drummer. He plays with bands in bars around the city and he plays on the streets. Zainab sells her handmade jewelry in an outdoor market with other crafters. Walter attends his conference and in between becomes enraptured by Tarek's music. Walter begins learning to drum. And then something happens.

I fell in love with these characters. Tarek's mother arrives from Michigan and I fell in love with her too. In "The Station Agent," McCarthy addresses how we are defined by the people we collect around us. In "The Visitor" he goes beyond that to show how dramatically these connections to other people can shape our lives.

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