Bohemian Cinema By Jonathan Pacheco

“Towelhead” (2008)

Directed by Alan Ball

Satisfaction:Frustrated Tags: American Beauty, Satire, Alan Ball

Nothing is Private

Perhaps someone needs to have a talk with Alan Ball. When he’s not obsessing over death on the small screen, he’s filling the big screen with middle aged men drooling over jailbait. Instead of the sultry, petal-clad Angela of American Beauty, we now have Jasira (yes, sounds like “Jazeera”), a 13 year old half-Lebanese girl so advanced in puberty that the other girls in the locker room refer to her as “Chewie.” Forced from her mother’s home after an incident, she now lives with her Lebanese half, an astoundingly narcissistic father who prides himself in being capable of holding two conflicting thoughts in his mind at the same time. “That’s the definition of intelligence,” he proclaims.

When the military family a few houses down decides to drop by with some good old American apple pie, it doesn’t take long for the man of this family, Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), to take an inappropriate liking to Jasira. It’s so quick, in fact, that one suspects he initiated the “welcome to the neighborhood” visit himself the moment he saw the young girl step out of her car into the Texas sunlight. Before we know it, Jasira’s babysitting for the Vuoso’s, discovering a porn stash, and subsequently discovering her own body.

Slow Down, You’re Going Too Fast

From the first frame of the film, it becomes clear that neither Towelhead nor Alan Ball intend to take their time. We’re immediately thrust into a situation with this girl and her family without really knowing what’s going on, and because of the film’s insistence on jumping from incident to incident, it’ll be a long time before we feel like we know anyone or anything.

Towelhead is at its weakest when it tosses us to and from sexual encounters with little regard. Ball seems to feel that it’s enough to simply show us events, despite them being almost devoid of emotional context. It just makes it more difficult to reflect on Jasira or any of the other characters, because we never have time to do so; something else is already going on. Not surprisingly, the film began to engage me when characters were allowed to sit and talk. They were allowed time to be rather than do. For instance, a dinner scene between Eckhart and Summer Bishil (the charismatic actress playing Jasira), though brief, enables us to see the conflict in Travis, and even some of his reasoning (or, rather, his excuses). We’re allowed to see that he’s more than a simplistic villain. And the same goes for Jasira. Without a scene like this, it’s difficult to read her—not in an appealing, mysterious way, but in a frustrating and fruitless way. Yet this dinner allows her to reveal herself and show that things really are going on in her head. We just didn’t know it because we were too busy being subjected to masturbation and sex scenes.

Eckhart’s character puts it well when he asks Jasira why she behaves like she’s a little kid when her awareness says she’s anything but. She knows the effect she has on the other sex, he says with a smile. I found myself thinking the same about her, but we were both wrong. She’s aware that something important is going on, but it’s way over her head. During that dinner, she sips Travis’s margarita when he escapes to the restroom, and upon his return, she claims she’s already drunk. She wonders aloud why Travis likes her. “I know why,” she says. “Because of my boobs.” While the Army reservist doesn’t deny that, he adds that there’s something more that he sees in her. Jasira’s unfortunate problem is that the cognizance which she exudes implicates a deeper, mature understanding of herself and of sexuality, when, from this dinner conversation, we can see that nothing could be further from the truth.

The Blatant Beast

But for the most part, as with American Beauty, characters in this film tend to be rather shallow and over the top; too many scenes are littered with histrionics. Watching American Beauty, I placed the blame for this type of stagy acting on Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey; both have done extensive work in theater, so I figured they were meshing art forms. But Towelhead tells me that escalating things to a theatrical level may be Alan Ball’s idea of satire. Almost every character in these films is a diva, bipolar, or both; I guess that’s supposed to “mean something.”

One of the film’s more subtle points is the not-so-subtle placement of The Red Badge of Courage, which Thomas, Jasira’s black boyfriend, reads throughout the film. It’s intended as a metaphor for Jasira’s plight, with the red badge being not only the blood she spills during her first period, but also the blood that comes from losing her virginity—especially considering the manner in which she lost it. She shuns courage in favor of fear for most of the film until the requisite breakthrough moment. While it’s not a clever metaphor, it helps give the film a little bit of direction by blatantly confirming this motif. I’d prefer a more tactful revelation of thematic undertones, but Towelhead feels so clueless about its own identity that I’ll take what I can get, as long as it helps clear up some of that confusion.

From scene to scene, the movie feels like its story was thought up on the fly until its trite conclusion. In an insult to the audience’s intelligence, the writer peppers these last scenes with tiny “redemptive moments,” telling us that these people aren’t complete monsters, despite spending the last two hours trying to convince us otherwise. It’s ironic that so many storytellers believe that a mountain of evil can be erased by a small good deed, when the reverse holds more truth.

What might be the most disappointing part of Towelhead is that, for a film that tries so hard to be extreme and flamboyant, it ends up leaving little impact on me. I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse, and I’ve seen much more provocative films. I own American Beauty, enjoying the flaws and triumphs, and I’ve seen Ball prove himself with Six Feet Under and show potential with True Blood. It brought me no pleasure to watch him push so hard with Towelhead, only to end up nowhere.

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