Review of Towelhead (2008) by Vmedia Berkeley Ca. S — 13 Aug 2008

I was pleased with the long awaited directorial debut of Alan Ball does not disappoint. Towelhead, based on the Alicia Erian novelof the same name, is an alternately moving and bitingly funny portrait of a Lebanese American father and daughter who are lost at sea when it comes to understanding the country they live in, but no more so than their neighbors. Fans of the television show Six Feet Under will instantly recognize Peter Macdissi, the actor playing Rifat, the father, as the unscrupulous art teacher Olivier who was forever giving terrible advice to Lauren Ambrose's character on that show.

Ball shows a real facility for mixing comedy and drama here, and also for delivering some keen insights about race and religion that risk offending in order to make a point. He's also able to use race to elicit big laughs, which is even trickier. Case in point: one of the film's biggest jokes comes when, after Rifat has forbidden Jasira from seeing an African-American boy that she likes because he fears it will shame her in society.

This picture has the biting humor of American Beauty, and exhibits that same quality of the sheer bone-weariness of being an American, but skirts the ponderous, life and death stakes of that film in favor of a fast-moving, ground-level story, and the result is a success.

I do recommend it and I hope its gets an audience.

Vince.

Vmedia UCB.