Movie Review: Towelhead (aka Nothing Is Private)
Writer-director Alan Ball sets his movie “Towelhead” in the days of the first Gulf War, and stupefies it with the same antiseptic anomie of “American Beauty,” which Sam Mendes directed. Ball’s got in mind the sexualization of Jasira, a wallflower of a 13-year-old half-American, half-Lebanese girl. After her mother Gail’s new boyfriend talks Jasira into letting him shave her pubes, Gail (Maria Bello) shunts her daughter off to the suburban prefab home of her phenomenally uptight father, Rifat (Macdissi). He’s a bourgeois Middle Eastern fop determined to out-Americanize his bigoted army-reservist neighbor Vuoso (Eckhart), who harbors a racial mistrust towards Rifat.
What, you may wonder, does a white American fortysomthing male know — intimately know — about the headspace of a girl like Jasira? Nothing, it turns out, you can’t get in a pamphlet and a segment on NBC’s Dateline. Ball isn’t much of a critic of the male headspace either. Vuoso is just Kevin Spacey’s character from “American Beauty” only dumbed down, and less self-aware, while Rifat is an irritating Middle Eastern male nightmare — dandyfied and all-controlling. None of the males in “Towelhead” is particularly complex or interesting (no one in this disaster is) — they’re defined entirely by their ego or libido, without contradictory or enriching shades.
Soon after Jasira moves in with Rifat, the neighbor Vuoso takes a shine to Jasira and soon enough gets his hands on her in a vulnerable, private moment. Jasira submits to every male in the movie — she’s too powerless to resist at first, and, as a girl growing up amidst sexualized female imagery catering to men — she wants, in spite of her fears, to please them. But little by little, she discovers sexual pleasure, and the power that she wields over men.
Ball brings race into the mix not only in the form of the slurs that Jasira is regularly subjected to at school, but in Thomas too, who’s black (and therefore off-limits to Jasira) who initiates her into something of a respectful sexual relationship. Respectful sexual relationship. Is this necessarily the right message to leave us with, that Jasira is now old enough to have sex like a woman when, in every other way, she is barely a teenage girl? I’m not saying that Ball doesn’t have the right to tell his story, but there are times we need come down hard on irreponsible, thoughtless, reckless artists who do more damage than good, because they fail their material and their audience.
To be fair, Ball tracks Jasira from a put-upon sexual victim to a budding woman more in control of her sexuality quite nicely, but what’s so persistently annoying are his one-dimensional characters — each character a different side to Ball’s simplistic polemic about sexuality, racism, and the ideal of American feminity. Fact is, “Towelhead” is a clumsy, witless, tedious trudge — a movie that does no one any good.
Towelhead (1.5 stars out of 5)
Director: Alan Ball
Cast: Summer Bishil, Aaron Eckhart, Peter Macdissi, Toni Collette, Maria Bello, Eugene Jones
