If you've been to the movies a few times in the last twenty years, you've probably seen Richard Jenkins. Trust me. Jenkins isn't a household name, and he doesn't really have a household appearance, either: he's tall, bald, and bland-looking, and at 60 doesn't appear all that different from when he first started popping up in movies, in such roles as the doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters who gently breaks its to the hypochondriac played by Woody Allen that he doesn't have a malignant brain tumor. Yet Jenkins is a crackerjack actor, capable of using what God gave him to surprising effect. His ability to suggest something cracked or wild inside a businesslike frame has made him a favorite of such directors as the Coens and the Farrellys, and David O. Russell, who used him in Flirting with Disaster as an FBI agent who wanted to adopt a baby to raise with his professional partner and lover, Josh Brolin. His best-known role may be the patriarchal undertaker in the HBO Six Feet Under, where his character was dead from the start of the series and still usually seemed to be the only person on the show who was having a good time. In the new movie The Visitor, which was written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, Jenkins has his shot at carrying a movie, playing a widowed economics professor who has disappeared inside his own orderly world. “I understood this man,” Jenkins told Jeremy W. Peters in an interview for the New York Times. “I understood his reluctance to reach out, to become part of things.”
That's actually not a surprise, given that McCarthy wrote the movie with Jenkins in mind and then worked closely with him in fleshing out the details. (A working actor himself, McCarthy seems to have a special affinity for showcasing actors who not many people would automatically see as leading man material; his first film as a writer-director was The Station Agent, which put Peter Dinklage on the map. Four years ago, McCarthy started feeling Jenkins out with regard to their working together. Then, as Jenkins recalls it, “About a year and a half later he called me and said: ‘I wrote this script. Would you take a look at it?’ He sent me the script, and I read it, and I just loved it. I mean, I just loved it. And I said to him, ‘Nobody’s going to give you any money to do this movie with me in the lead.’ He said: ‘That wasn’t my question. My question was, do you want to do it?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ” Having failed to talk his director out of hiring him, Jenkins now declares himself pleased with the resulting movie, as does McCarthy. The Visitor opens this coming weekend in New York and Los Angeles. Now if Jenkins can just survive the publicity tour...