Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.
The number of films about Middle Eastern immigrants in the US have ticked up noticeably in recent years, for obvious reasons, and as a Middle Easterner myself, I had high hopes that Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka would provide a corrective to the easy potshots at suburban ignorance that are starting to become a staple of the genre. My hopes were dashed, but that’s not to say that there’s a lot to admire in Dabis’s low-budget, earnest effort.
The first is Nisreen Faour’s performance as Muna, the optimistic but overwhelmed Palestinian divorcee who comes to suburban Illinois with her young son Fadi (Melkar Muallem) in search of a better life. Commanding the screen, Faour brings to her character a wide-eyed generosity that conveys her hopes and dreams through the fact of her sheer presence: When she gets a job at White Castle and tells her family that she’s actually working at the bank next door, we don’t need any extra cutting or close-ups or over-emoting to understand both the hit to her dignity as well as the chin-up resoluteness with which she tackles the job. Faour does with simple posture and bearing what most actors try (and usually fail) to do with dialogue and heavy-handed histrionics. Whenever Amreeka focuses on Muna’s plight, it soars: From the way in which she feels like a burden to the relatives who’ve opened up their home to her, to her ignorance at some of the social mores of middle-class America, I feel like I’ve seen this person before, in real life. Dabis gets her exactly right, and that is to her eternal credit.
Alas, the rest of the story starts to fail her right quick, by focusing on the troubles Fadi has at school with a bunch of white douchebags straight out of central casting. We know these guys will fuck things up, we know the name “Osama” wil get tossed around, and we know that Fadi himself will probably do something stupid in retaliation. I’m not saying things like this never happened (though, please, Middle Eastern filmmakers take note: the US was actually way better at avoiding this sort of thing than pretty much any other country) but I am saying that seeing it onscreen for the umpteenth time offers little insight or truth. Amreeka does give us plenty of sympathetic white characters – from Muna’s kind-hearted, blue-haired coworker Matt (Brodie Sanderson) to Fadi’s principal, Mr. Novatski (Joseph Ziegler) – but they feel to me like figures placed on a spectrum of tolerance, which may just be a side-effect of my response to the obvious places the rest of the story goes.
