Towelhead (2008)

Director: Alan Ball

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.

After her white trash mother Gail (Maria Bello) takes her loser boyfriend’s side over her daughter’s as the film begins — blaming her confused daughter like she’s a fully aware Lolita — she packs her off to her estranged ex-husband’s suburban home in Houston, Texas. Her father, Rifat Maroun (Peter Macdissi), a Christian convert who still strictly adheres to his Lebanese beliefs about female modesty only offers further confusion and misguided advice ranging from locking his daughter out of their home after he discovers a faculty member had given her a tampon (which violates his belief that they’re for married women only) to smacking her for wearing anything revealing.

Unable to discuss any of these matters with a willing adult, Jasira finds herself strangely drawn in by the sexually proactive images in the media and the objectification of women in the adult magazines kept by her neighbor Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart). And soon Jasira gets in way over her head when she begins a tentative, flirtatious relationship with the all too willing Mr. Vuoso. She also begins seeing an African American boy (Eugene Jones III) from school, much to the chagrin of her father, who has racist double standards of his own, similar to Eckhart’s racism about her Lebanese father. And never mind the fact that Jasira’s father has begun spending more and more time away from home dating a sexually confident, Greek American colleague at NASA. However, events come to a head when Jasira’s newlywed neighbors, the hippies Melina and Gil Hines (Toni Collette and Matt Letscher) return to her street from their honeymoon and become aware of the nefarious goings-on between Mr. Vuoso and the impressionable young, Jasira.

Shocking and in-your-face, making it through Ball’s film is a litmus test in its own right and while I was completely unaware where this overwhelmingly bleak and dark storyline was headed, somehow he manages to weave everything back up for a touching and fully earned finale. And for those who bravely manage to stay through the controversial feature (as there were many walkouts, gasps, and whispers of disapproval right from the start), it’s the type of film that’s destined to provoke as much conversation as it will outrage.

Ball intelligently and subtly addresses the conflicting images and misinformation of not just young women of other ethnicities (especially given its early '90s Gulf War setting) but all young women coming of age in these confusing and far too fast-paced times where miniskirts and bare midriffs are available in the children’s department of major stores and antifeminist Pretty Woman-like tales of hookers who become Cinderella reign supreme.

Some of his overly ambitious yearnings do fail to strike a chord and challenge us as the thirteen-year-old girl resolves to continue a healthy sex life by the end of the film in a way that would alarm any adult. But Ball earns points for trying and for daring to hold up a mirror to issues we don’t want to face and giving us the chance to view the mixed messages flying around in every direction from the point of view of a character we wouldn’t normally meet in mainstream, blockbuster cinema.

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