Based on the acclaimed novel by Alicia Erian, Emmy and Academy Award-winning screenwriter (“Six Feet Under,” American Beauty) Alan Ball’s feature-length directorial debut Towelhead is one of the more explosively inflammatory and controversial motion pictures of the year. It is also one of the most movingly and emotionally entertaining.

Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil in Warner Independent's Towelhead

This coming of age saga of young Arab-American, Jasira (Summer Bishil), girl dealing with the ups and downs of living in a suburban wasteland with a clueless father who just doesn’t want to understand the cultural contradictions surrounding them packs an astonishing wallop. Every time I thought I knew which way the film was going to twist or turn suddenly Ball flipped things and went an entirely different direction. It is a movie that risks everything, including alienating its audience, all in the name of staying true to the characters inhabiting its milieu.

The layers seem to go on forever. Jasira is a 13-year-old whose American mother Gail (Maria Bello) sends her to live with her immigrant father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) in Huston after her new boyfriend starts coming on to her. There, she encounters lonely Army reservist neighbor Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart) whose external racism towards the family is masked only by his grown fascination with Jasira, an African American fellow High School student, Thomas (Eugene Jones), who she starts her first relationship with and Melena (Toni Collette) and Gil (Matt Letscher) Hines, a married couple fluent in Middle Eastern culture and expecting their first child.

At its heart, Towelhead is about a young woman dealing with her sexual awakening. On the periphery, however, there is far more happening. Travis is a sexual predator whose intentions and desires are nowhere near as evil as we think (and probably feel) they should be. Rifat isn’t as ideologically closed-minded and disapproving as his racist reactions to Thomas would lead you to believe. The Hines are nowhere near as condescending or belittling as their initial remarks and opinions allude.

This isn’t a film of blacks and whites, and anyone expecting it would be isn’t familiar with Ball’s past enterprises. This is a filmmaker obsessed with contradictions, one who is anxious and excited to find the beauty in a person’s flaws and the horrors in their wonders. He wants to see the demons and he wants to see the angels, but more then that he wants to see the people walking the streets with both of them uncomfortably sitting on their respective shoulders.

All of which means this isn’t an easy movie to watch. There is one heck of a lot asked of the audience by this story, a ton of material they must find their way through and make decisions and choices about one way or another. The gray areas are deep and wide, and information comes at ferocious speed in every shape and size imaginable. And while all of this is delivered with an overall subtlety that’s commendable, there are more than a couple moments where Ball pulls out a formulaic sledgehammer to force his point home.

The acting is universally stellar, with young Bishil making a fantastic debut. She’s in just about every scene of the picture, her ability to dig in to Jasira and make all her multifaceted dimensions come alive downright stunning. There is a deeply wounded complexity to her performance speaking volumes, and by the time the film was over I’d almost felt like the teenager was confiding her problems to me personally. 

There is plenty more here I could say, but I wonder if the movie would be better served if I just leave it alone and call it a day. What I will state is that some out their will loathe this picture which, to my way of thinking, is all to the well and good. Towelhead doesn’t allow for fence-sitting, it doesn’t accept standing on the sidelines, and in a year with plenty to think about it’s refreshing to find a movie more than willing to enter the debate with something of actual importance to say.

- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle 

Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)

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