‘Towelhead’: Ball Throws In the Towel

When Jasira (Summer Bishil), a 13-year-old Arab-American girl, accepts an offer from her mother’s live-in boyfriend to assist her in some highly personal grooming, her mother, Gail (Maria Bello), decides it’s time for her daughter to go live with her father in far-off Houston. But the uptight Houston of Alan Ball’s “Towelhead,” which opens Friday at the Angelika Film Center, is preparing for the first Gulf War, and Jasira’s Lebanese-Christian father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), is a priggish and abusive hypocrite. Taking a seat at the breakfast table in an outfit arguably too risqué for an after-school trip to the food court, Jasira receives a harsh slap of admonishment from Rifat. “Go put some proper clothes on,” he hisses at her. “You’re not in Syracuse anymore.”No, indeed. Unfortunately for Jasira, she, her father, and the rest of the characters in “Towelhead,” the feature-length directing debut of Mr. Ball, who won an Oscar for his screenplay to “American Beauty” and created HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and “True Blood,” are trapped in the smarmily satirical suburban-wasteland cliché that American filmmakers have periodically revisited with an increasing lack of vision since Thornton Wilder’s fresh, small-town-underbelly romp “Shadow of a Doubt” became an Alfred Hitchcock film in 1943.There’s nothing intrinsically offensive about Jasira’s experiments with pornography, nor about her eventually catastrophic flirtation with her married National Guardsman neighbor, Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), her relatively graphic loss of virginity, or various other middling personal humiliations and nonfatal atrocities committed during the course of her numbing and repetitive march to maturity in “Towelhead.” What is offensive is the galling lack of compassion Mr. Ball appears to harbor for Jasira and the rest of his one-dimensional characters, and for an audience tasked with watching them weep, preach, fornicate, and forbear their way to a queasily predictable and perfunctorily balanced status quo.With the exception of one neighborhood couple (played by Toni Collette and Matt Letscher) of such one-sided multicultural PC enlightenment and tolerance that they could have inclined Woody Guthrie to vote for Barry Goldwater, nearly everyone older than 30 in “Towelhead” is either a self-absorbed scold or a pederast. Never mind that Melina (Ms. Collette), the sainted wife in question, hauls a late-term pregnancy around with such obvious portent that she might as well have named the unborn child “third-act crisis” in advance.As if Melina’s nearly audible ticking baby bomb weren’t sloppy enough from a storytelling standpoint, “Towelhead” contains not one, not two, not three, but four separate instances of dramatic conflict precipitated by unsuccessfully disposed-of hygienic and contraceptive items spread out over three bathrooms. Is Mr. Ball trying to suggest that teenage girls in the early ’90s were temporarily rendered incapable of covering their tracks? More likely, he didn’t think enough of his characters and the logical and realistic dimensions of their world to bother scrutinizing them with the same intensity and potential concern and affection that an audience might.Mr. Ball has taken a page out of “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes’s book and pulled out all the stops in pursuit of ludicrously obvious visual conceits that juxtapose religious iconography with crass commercial imagery in exaggerated low and high angles, and fussily off-kilter close-ups inexplicably shot through crooked arms. His general pursuit of ugly, tobacco-filtered, fuzzily lit interiors is relieved somewhat by the fact that “Towelhead” appears to have set a new record for most shots with an American flag prominently displayed, non-Jerry Bruckheimer movie division.Like “American Beauty” and other similarly self-congratulatory and ineptly crafted twaddle as Vadim Perelman’s “House of Sand and Fog” and Todd Field’s “In the Bedroom,” “Towelhead” is yet one more lazy, Hollywood moralizing melodrama, clumsily and unconvincingly repackaged as something honest, independent, and empowering.

‘Towelhead’: Ball Throws In the Towel

‘Towelhead’: Ball Throws In the Towel

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