April 19–26, 2001

movies

Jail Bonding

A dying prisoner reconnects with his family.

by Cindy Fuchs

The Visit

Directed by Jordan Walker-Pearlman
An Urbanworld release

recommended

Helping hand: Alex (Hill Harper) shares a moment with his mother (Marla Gibbs).

The set up for The Visit is at once simple and endlessly complicated. Alex Waters (Hill Harper) is in prison, convicted of a rape he insists he did not commit and facing the end of his life. As he’s dying of AIDS (contracted during his incarceration), Alex feels more abandoned than ever; it’s been five years since his parents last came to visit. But his older, successful businessman brother Tony (Obba Babatundé), just come for his first visit in 10 months, promises that he’ll convince them to come, if only to say good bye.

First-time writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman doesn’t much open out the staging of Kosmond Russell’s play, offering little in the way of action or elaborate camera angles. Aside from flashbacks that only partly explain characters’ motives and fears, the film’s set entirely in the prison, more specifically in the visiting room where Alex meets with Tony and eventually with his parents, Lois (Marla Gibbs) and Henry (Billy Dee Williams), separated by a table and years of regret, anger and misunderstanding.

The first visit by Alex’s parents is, predictably, wrenching. While the tearful and warm-hearted Lois wants desperately to reconnect with her son, Henry remains quietly furious. In this regard, he’s not unlike Tony; their similarity comes across in their straight-backed demeanor and careful grooming. Where Alex looks frail and tense, the other Waters men are solid, comfortable with themselves, confident (at first, anyway). The film is really about the ways that appearances can mask both distress and unknown resources, superficiality and emotional depth. Alex and his father have to get past surfaces — their own and each other’s — to make sense of their lives so far.

Perhaps the film’s most intriguing aspect is the way that Alex adapts his behavior to accommodate (or challenge) his several visitors, as well as sessions with the prison psychologist, Dr. Coles (Phylicia Rashad). Walker-Pearlman uses original music by different artists — working in different genres — as background for each of these encounters: Michael Bearden, Stefan Dickerson, Ramsey Lewis, Stanley A. Smith and the great jazz trumpeter Wallace Roney. The effect is an elegant consideration of the ways that music creates character and mood, for viewers as well as for Alex, whose own subjective experience is mirrored in this process.

Tony also shifts demeanor when he meets with the parole board; here he’s deferential and painfully self-contained, knowing all too well that their decision will change everything, one way or the other. Showing their interactions before and after Alex’s appearance before them, the film also makes you aware that the board makes their decision not only based on the merits of his case, but their own interpersonal dynamic, their individual agendas, even what they had for breakfast that morning. The machinery of "justice" depends on so many factors, subjective as well as objective, that the reality of one man’s circumstances too often has precious little to do with judgments passed and outcomes reached.

The Visit’s most compelling focus has to do with measures of masculinity and fears of not living up to them. At one point, Alex asks his father if he believes that a "real man" can get AIDS. Even aside from the homosexual anxiety this question evinces, it points to the many social and political ways that men are evaluated and judged, and parallels Henry, Tony and Alex’s concerns that their very different understandings of responsibility and self-identity might match up, or at least complement one another. Where the women play stereotypical roles, again and again showing their capacity for support and resilience, the men struggle with the possibility that being more generous might be evidence of moral strength and emotional muscularity rather than weakness. Remarkably, the film poses such questions without making its men into either heroic or melodramatic figures. They remain complicated and imperfect, even as they come to their inevitable reconciliation.

The fact that Alex is confronting his own imminent death, of course, makes his search for meaning rather immediate, and the closeness of his scenes — the smallness of his cell and the repeated tight frames of his face — neatly suggest both his tension and his increasing ability to slow down and understand his family, rather than fighting himself and them, as he has done for so many years. The lack of comprehension that has so plagued his life is dissolving into a kind of ease with himself and acceptance of others. Understanding is relative, in more ways than one.