Review of Miral (2010) by Walter M — 22 Jun 2012

"Miral" starts with Bertha(Vanessa Redgrave) introducing Hind Husseini(Hiam Abbass) to Edward Smith(Willem Dafoe) at the American Colony Hotel in Palestine in 1947. That introduction comes in handy decades later with Edward, now a colonel in the United States Army, being able to navigate Israeli roadblocks for Hind who now runs an orphanage. Meanwhile, Nadia(Yasmine Al Massri) looks elsewhere for shelter to escape the abuse she suffers at home and ends up in a seedy strip club before getting six months for headbutting a woman on a bus. In jail, she shares a cell with Fatima(Ruba Blal), a terrorist, who intrudoces her to her brother(Alexander Siddig) who Nadia marries on her release. And that's how Miral(Freida Pinto) enters the story...

As a director, Julian Schnabel has a way of utilizing his skills as an artist to give his films a unique beauty. At the same time, he has a way of getting tripped up by politics and that could not be any truer than with "Miral." Either, he ignores them altogether when he intercuts a bombing with Polanski's "Repulsion" which is getting a little cutesy for my tastes. Or else Schnabel is as subtle as having a boulder dropped on your head. And I say that, even though I am on his side when it comes to the subject of Palestinian independence. Nor does it help in going over the familiar terrain of 40 years of history that he cannot decide who the movie should be about, Hind or Miral, as neither have much in common with each other, outside of their nationality. One place where Schnabel succeeds is in his insight that there is a difference in the attitudes of generations of Palestinians. Whereas the earlier generation may have been more accommodating, the younger generation is more willing to fight, resulting in the First Infitada.