Racist pedophiles and sex-addicted, colonial America re-enactors? Talk about risky business. These two new releases aren't for the faint of heart but if you can make it past the opening scenes of each without sprinting toward the exits, you'll discover two of the most challenging yet thought-provoking independent works of the year so far.
Towelhead
What if screenwriter Alan Ball’s breakthrough work wouldn’t have made Kevin Spacey’s American Beauty character Lester Burnham so surprisingly likable? Sure, he was childish, ridiculous, misguided, and his obsession with the underage beauty played by Mena Suvari bordered on pedophilia. But when he was played by Spacey, uttering Ball’s witty and intelligent dialogue and with the mature direction of Sam Mendes, somehow we felt reassured that he wouldn’t go too far in his goal and would eventually, to quote Cher in Moonstruck, “snap out of it!”
Well, to answer that question of “what if”, in Alan Ball’s first time out as a feature filmmaker he revisits thematically similar territory in his brilliantly penned adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Alicia Erian. The first time we see the smugly handsome smile offered by the blonde, subtly racist Army reservist Aaron Eckhart as he appears with his wife and child in tow at his Lebanese neighbor’s doorstep and addresses the thirteen-year-old daughter Jasira (Summer Bishil) as having a very pretty name for such a very pretty girl, something in his tone and his gaze doesn’t feel right. Namely, we want Lester Burnham to drop in, run around the block to music by The Who, smoke dope with Ricky the neighbor kid, and ask Chris Cooper’s character to kick Eckhart’s ass.
Initially titled Nothing Is Private before, Ball - always a stranger to playing it safe with his work on HBO’s brilliant and twisted Six Feet Under - fought back against the controversy from the Arab-American community to stick with Erian’s original title, Towelhead. Although activists tried to persuade Ball and the studio Warner Independent Pictures to change the derogatory and loaded title, Ball stuck to his guns as a gay man, fully aware of hateful terminology in an effort to augment the way such horrible speech can affect characters and promote prejudice.
However, after only watching five minutes of his film, I realized that the title was frankly the least of his worries. He makes us squirm right from the start, refusing to let up in his vivid and brutally graphic depiction of his young heroine’s struggle to come of age, understand her own budding sexuality, and deal with far too much male attention due to not just her beauty but well-developed figure.
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