Towelhead

Towelhead

written and directed by Alan Ball
Starring: Summer Bishil, Peter Macdissi, Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello and Toni Collette

Nearly every aspect of Towelhead feels calculated and patently false. Much in the same way that there's something admirable about transgressive material that's making a large and salient point, there's something desperate and almost immature about transgression for its own sake. Films that try to shock, push buttons and appear provocative when it is clear that the writer-director (in this case, Alan Ball) has little or nothing insightful to say about the subject matter.

Towelhead, written and directed by Alan Ball, who won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for penning American Beauty, tells the story of Jasira, a thirteen-year-old girl with a white mother (Maria Bello) and a Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi). After Jasira allows her mother's boyfriend to help her shave her pubic hair, her mother flies into a rage, siding with the boyfriend, not her daughter, and sends Jasira to live in Texas with her dad.

Her father is a creation of peculiar and often flimsy characterization. He is a Christian, but is often assumed to be Muslim because he's from the Middle East. He is Americanized in some ways, but not so much in others (to the point of inconsistency). For instance, he slaps Jasira when she shows up to breakfast in a tank top, yet seems to take little to no offense to his girlfriend liberally applying makeup to Jasira's face.

In a lot of ways, the film is about Jasira's sexual awakening, as she babysits for the family next door, whose son calls her "Towelhead." There, she discovers the family's patriarch, Travis (played by Aaron Eckhart) and his pornographic magazines, which prompt her to have her first orgasm. This is all compounded and complicated by her forays into sex with Travis and with Thomas, an African-American boy her own age. Fine. I have said before that I have no problems with frank portrayals of female teenage sexual desire, something seriously lacking in American films. But so much here exists to shock and offend. Only to shock and offend. Is Alan Ball trying to turn stereotypes about Middle Eastern women on their head? Probably. But this film actually serves to reinforce a lot of those stereotypes. Oh, and Summer Bashil, the actress playing Jasira, happens to be of Mexican, Scottish and East-Indian descent in a nice bit of Sacheen Littlefeather-esque racism. Jasira, for all her sexual desire and curiosity is an incredibly passive character. Her sexual misadventures happen to her, but are not brought about because of her doing. Alan Ball writes her so that she is placed in a situation where she allows herself to be manually stimulated by Travis to the point that he breaks her hymen and ends up with her blood all over his hand. It's shocking, yes. But it's hardly more than that.

Alan Ball also tries desperately to play with preconceived notions of African-American characters. My friend and I were the only non-white people in a theater filled with a white people who laughed riotously and the film's forced, heavy-handed humor. At one point, I actually leaned over to him and said "This movie is so obviously written by a white person." Thomas, the aforementioned African-American character, is so polished, so charming, so well-spoken, and so model-minority that he could only be the creation of a writer clearly suffering from Liberal white guilt. And yet, with all that, Ball reinforces one of the greatest black stereotypes in his characterization of Thomas. He is essentially portrayed as an oversexed predator. One who grabs Jasira's boob without prompting as soon as his parents go upstairs, when Jasira is over at his house for dinner one night.

Of course, Jasira's father doesn't approve of their friendship and the film also attempts to address the issue of racism as well. It fails here as well. Alan Ball bites off way more than he can chew with this fill, trying to tackle so many issues that the whole thing all but collapses in on itself. Had Ball dedicated the film to just one of these topics and actually done some research and honest characterization, the film might have succeeded on some level.

What of the performances? Praise is being heaped onto Summer Bashil, who plays Jasira and was 18 at the time the movie was filmed. She's fine. She's serviceable in a role that's completely underwritten and doesn't call for her to do much. Toni Collette is interesting as one half a liberal white couple whose fascination with and need to protect Jasira borders on exoticism. But she too is not given much to do. My mother and my sister recently went to see Tyler Perry's "The Family that Preys" and they commented that Tyler Perry is not kind to women in his films. I replied that there is sociological data to suggest that closeted gay men are often inherently misogynistic, so that might account for it. But what accounts for Alan Ball, who's out and proud, writing such flimsy and often sexist female characterizations here and in his debut American Beauty? I enjoyed American Beauty, but I am able to love it in spite of its problems, most of which stem from the script. That's how misguided Towelhead is. It points out its own flaws, but also makes you realize all the ways in which American Beauty is also misguided. And that Sam Mendes truly deserves his Best Director trophy. His direction may have been the only thing that saved it.

Grade: C-