Longer, slightly more unhinged cut of a review in today's Oregonian....
Let me put it this way:
I think the coming-of-age molestation drama "Towelhead" is beautifully acted and accomplishes exactly what writer/director Alan Ball set out to accomplish. It is equally true that as soon as I was done watching this powerfully revolting movie, I needed a moist towelette to wipe off the erotically charged skeeviness Ball had been rubbing in my face for the last two hours.
Ball wrote "American Beauty" and was the creative mastermind behind "Six Feet Under," both of which dwelled on sex with minors. The man has clearly staked out his thematic patch of soil: "Towelhead," adapted from Alicia Erian's novel, relentlessly focuses on the physical, verbal and sexual abuse heaped on Lebanese-American 13-year-old Jasira (Summer Bishil, who's 20 in real life, thank God).
That abuse begins in the very first scene, when Jasira's mother's boyfriend shows an uncomfortable interest in the girl's personal hygiene. The mother (Maria Bello) blames Jasira and packs the kid off to live in Texas with her racist/misogyist Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi) -- who slaps and threatens Jasira for even the slightest immodesty and forbids her from dating an African-American classmate whose first word to Jasira is a racist slur. (He immediately apologizes and becomes blandly horny and pleasant for the rest of the film.)
In the sort of diagrammatic setup that made "American Beauty" feel so lamely on-the-nose for me, the story is set during the first Gulf War, and Jasira and her Middle Eastern father live in a cul-de-sac two doors down from a bigoted National Guard redneck (Aaron Eckhart). The house between these two flag-flying, feuding neighbors is occupied by a couple of perfect, enlightened Peace Corps types (Toni Collette, Matt Letscher).
This banal metaphor of a neighborhood gets a nice fat Magic Marker underline when the peacenik couple provides safe haven for Jasira after Eckhart's character starts molesting Jasira, onscreen, in graphic detail. Repeatedly. With the camera filming it all like straight-to-video erotica.
I get what Ball is trying to do here, I think: He wants to make the viewer uncomfortable in an unconventional way -- refusing to turn away his camera, "Salo"-style, while confronting middle-class hypocrisy (as Hollywood sees it, anyway) and showing the worst abuse perpetrated by complex characters. Certainly there are some powerful redemptive moments in the film's final 20 minutes, which come as a relief after the previous hour and change of gratuitous sleazy horror.
But somewhere around the second time I saw Jasira on the toilet and the second time a male fixated on shaving her nethers and the fourth time someone groped Jasira in a long, lingering shot and the third time Jasira pleasured herself onscreen and the eighteenth time someone aimed a racial slur at Jasira and the second or third time I had to watch a long sex scene involving a 13-year-old -- a sex scene that was supposedly presenting a "healthy" alternative to everything else going on in Jasira's life -- something clicked in me and I said, "You know what, Alan Ball? I get it already. Spare me your moist little lecture." It's staggering to me that the version I saw had something like 10 minutes trimmed out to tone it down after a reportedly scandalous festival screening.
I'm aware of the dangers of confusing repulsion over what a movie's characters are doing with repulsion over the movie itself. (See: my "Choke" review, today.) But what repulsed me about "Towelhead" (beyond its pointlessly incendiary title) is this: Ball's idea of "confrontation" seems to include filming scenes of sexual abuse in an erotically charged way that could fill any screening of the film with pedos in raincoats.
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B-minus for craftsmanship, F-minus for sheer skeevy repulsiveness; 116 minutes; rated R for strong disturbing sexual content and abuse involving a young teen, and for language.
'Towelhead' (The Oregonian, Sept. 26, 2008)
Mr. Russell,
I just wanted to quickly thank you for your review of "Towelhead". This is exactly the kind of sick trash that Hollywood sneaks into mainstream theatres, promoted with adjectives like "Provocative!, Fearless! and Powerful!". My only objection with your review is that you only described this horrible filth with the word "porn" once.
-John in Salem
Posted by: john | September 26, 2008 at 03:45 PM