Towelhead: Emotionally Intense Contemporary Film

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photo: Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil play father and daughter in “Towelhead.” By Dale Robinette; copyright © 2008 by Warner Independent Pictures

All too many recent movies — even ones as otherwise thematically and stylistically different as Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Half Nelson, Youth Without Youth and The Wackness — have suffered from an odd problem. Their directors, perhaps responding to the idea that today’s audiences don’t care deeply about anything and are obsessed with the peculiar detachment known as “cool,” keep us at an emotional distance from the characters and make it difficult for us to identify with them. Watching these films, we get the idea that we’re supposed to be researchers looking down at the characters as if they were lab rats running a maze, not feeling for them and rooting for them to overcome their problems.

Alan Ball’s feature-film directorial debut, Towelhead, is a refreshing antidote to these terminally detached movies. Working from a source novel by Alicia Erian, Ball puts the emotions and torments of his central character, 13-year-old Jasira Maroun (Summer Bishil), front and center throughout the movie. Though Ball is today best known as the creator, producer and principal writer for the HBO cable-TV series Six Feet Under, his first breakthrough was as the writer of the 1999 film American Beauty, a vastly overrated film which won the Best Picture Oscar over worthier contenders like The Insider and Boys Don’t Cry and which, partly due to producer and studio censorship, made a hash of its themes: the internal hell of the suburban American family and the combustible combination of a girl burgeoning into puberty and a frustrated middle-aged man with a sexual itch for her.

Well, Ball got a chance at a do-over, and this time he got it right. Towelhead is a great movie that nails the targets Ball and director Sam Mendes missed in American Beauty — and the addition of anti-Arab racism and America’s generally prickly relationship with the Middle East (the film is set in the 1990-91 school year, against the backdrop of the first Gulf War) just adds depth and poignancy to the film. Jasira is the product of a Lebanese Christian father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi, who bears a striking resemblance to the late Peter Sellers in his East Indian roles) and an Anglo-American mother (Maria Bello); at the start of the movie she’s living with her mom in Syracuse, New York, but when mom catches her current boyfriend shaving Jasira’s pubic hair, she responds by shipping Jasira off to Houston to live with her dad.

Rifat is a bizarrely strict father who wants to raise Jasira in an old-school fashion, but he and she are both thrown a steady series of curve balls by the other characters. First up are the family living next door, the Vuosos: father Travis (Aaron Eckhart), mother Evelyn (Carrie Preston) and their son Zack (Chase Ellison). Travis is a U.S. reservist about to be sent to Baghdad — though he insists he’s part of a humanitarian team and not a warrior — and the Vuosos greet Jasira by showing up at Rifat’s doorstep with a tacky-looking homemade pie and ultimately hire Jasira as Zack’s babysitter.

Meanwhile, the escalation that led to the first Gulf War is steadily continuing — we see CNN footage of the first President Bush railing against Saddam Hussein — and when she finally shows up for school, Jasira gets a series of anti-Arab taunts from her fellow student: “towelhead,” “camel jockey,” “sand nigger” and the like. There’s a great little sequence in which an overworked school photographer is taking pictures of hundreds of students and doesn’t have time or film for a second take on anybody. When he calls her “Jasra,” she corrects, “It’s Jasira” — and just then he takes her picture, leaving her official school ID a singularly ugly image with her mouth wide open, a marvelously economical symbol for her alienation.

Jasira’s sexual awakening begins at the Vuosos’ home, when she discovers Travis’s stash of Palace (read: Playboy) magazines and starts masturbating to them — not out of any same-sex interest in the female Palace models than that they represent an ideal of totally liberated sexuality (illustrated by artful sequences illustrating the fantasies she has about them and how they live). Frozen out of the cliques at her school, Jasira makes only one friend: Thomas Bradley (Eugene Jones), an African-American and therefore a fellow outcast — only her dad thinks that’s horrible and forbids her to see him. (The idea that a member of one oppressed racial minority can harbor prejudices against another is yet another slice of the real world most filmmakers ignore but Ball embraces.) Told that she shouldn’t put up with anti-Arab racial epithets, Jasira strikes Zack when he lets fly with one — and naturally Zack’s parents go ballistic, fire Jasira as babysitter and forbid her from seeing Zack.

Jasira goes to the Vuosos’ home to apologize and see about getting her job back — and when she arrives there Travis is alone. Travis embraces her, then reaches into her crotch and rapes her with his finger, then is disgusted when he pulls it out and it’s all bloody. “I wouldn’t have done this to you if I’d known you were still a virgin!” he says — as if his act would have been morally O.K. if he’d been right in his assumption that this 13-year-old girl was already sexually active. The fatal compromise that made American Beauty a useless and unbelievable film was that Ball couldn’t have the Kevin Spacey character actually have sex with his 14-year-old fantasy girl, as he did in Ball’s original script: one of many details that, by letting Ball be Ball, the producers of Towelhead got right where the ones of American Beauty had gone wrong.

As the film progresses, we see Jasira caught in a world that is at once hyper-sexualized and hyper-prudish. Everyone she meets seems to see her in sexual terms — either as a target for sexual exploitation or as someone who needs to be “protected” from her would-be exploiters. Jasira’s confused emotional state rings true when Travis, after he’s molested her, takes her to dinner and tells her he wants to think of her as his daughter. No, she says; she wants him to think of her as his girlfriend — a confusion common in real-life victims of child sexual abuse but alien to the oversimplified version we get both in news reports and most fictions about abuse. Upset that she wanted to break off with him because of her dad’s racial prejudices, Thomas insists that the only way he’ll take Jasira back as a friend is if she has sex with him. (She’s at least savvy enough to insist that he use a condom.)

Even Jasira’s other neighbors — Gil Hines (Matt Letscher) and his visibly pregnant wife Melina (Toni Collette), who serve as the voices of reason in this film much as the Gay male couple did in American Beauty — are obsessed with her sexuality. Though they’re ostensibly trying to keep her from being exploited sexually — Melina notes Jasira’s visits to the Vuosos when Travis is home alone and is the first outside character to figure out what’s going on — they’re also drawn as busybodies with their own overprotective agenda. They’re the ones who tell her she doesn’t have to have sex if she doesn’t want to — a revelation that comes as a surprise to her, which is entirely understandable given that virtually every male who isn’t a family member has come on to her in one way or another — and their advice, though well-intentioned, causes more problems for Jasira than it solves.

Indeed, the film’s grim reality is that Jasira is so relentlessly spied on, either by the people who want to exploit her or the people who want to stop them, that she has no opportunity for a world of her own. Alan Ball even considered calling the film Nothing Is Private — which would have made that part of its theme explicit — and screened it that way at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival before reverting to the more in-your-face title of Erian’s source novel for the general release. But while the characters in the movie are using Jasira, Alan Ball is keeping us completely identified with her, putting her traumas and moral dilemmas front and center and making us ache for everything she’s going through.

At least part of the appeal of Towelhead lies in its surprising — at least for a modern movie — decorousness. Perhaps because Ball wanted it that way, or perhaps because he was worried about running afoul of all those thought-crime laws banning even simulated depictions of sex acts involving children (even though Summer Bishil, a convincing 13 in the movie, is actually 20 in real life), you don’t get the blizzard of private parts flung in your faces all too typical of sex in movies today. The sex scenes are subtle and careful to avoid even simulated penetration, yet they’re sufficiently well staged that you get the point. The extremities of the Motion Picture Production Code, rigidly enforced from 1934 to 1966, forced directors of that period to tread so softly on sexual matters that a movie like Towelhead would have been impossible — yet even a film as thematically frank as this one benefits from Ball’s rediscovery of the lost art of indirection.

If your idea of a great night at the movies is the latest potty-mouthed “comedy” or comic-book based “thrill ride,” stay away from Towelhead. If your idea of entertainment is to be at once challenged and moved, traumatized by the suffering of a character and exalted by her resilience; and if you want to be so touched by the central character of a film that you’ll forget it’s a work of fiction and ache for her the way you would for a real person going through what she’s going through; then see this film. You will love it and be touched by it the way all too few films do these days.