Certified Highness (Weekly Links)

Hanna/Saoirse

Links to reviews I wrote for the Herald this week:

Certified Copy. “Confounding but quite beautiful.”

Hanna. “Crashes from one thing to the next.”

Arthur. “Somehow manages to always have the camera in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Your Highness. “Just barely funny enough to get away with its nonstop raunchiness.”

Miral. (dead link; review below)

By Robert Horton

The argument that it’s possible to be too close to your subject is raised in “Miral,” a misfire of a film from director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Rula Jebreal. Schnabel is a superstar visual artist and the Oscar-nominated director of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”; Jebreal is a Palestinian journalist and author of the semi-autobiographical novel from which this film is adapted.

These two are also a couple in real life, which raises the point of speculation about getting “too close” to their material. Jumbled in form but fiery in spirit, “Miral” looks at recent history through the eyes of its female characters.

Last week’s film by Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman, “The Time That Remains,” began in 1948, the year of the establishment of the state of Israel. So does this film. The first section revolves around a real-life figure, Hind Husseini, a wealthy Palestinian woman who founded a school for war orphans in Jerusalem. She is played by the excellent actress Hiam Abbass (“The Visitor” and “Lemon Tree”), although there’s not much to play except a heroine of Mother Teresa-like goodness.

Eventually her school becomes home to Miral, a girl who has lost her mother. The mother (Yasmine Al Massri) is also someone whose tribulations we witness, including a jail stint for slapping an Israeli woman who called her an “Arab whore.” But the main focus is on Miral, who grows up into a world in which any group of teenage friends might easily harbor a few terrorists. The role is taken by Frieda Pinto, the “Slumdog Millionaire” star, who is earnest in an underwritten part.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict underlies the events of the movie, but the storytelling is so sketchy it doesn’t illuminate much of anything. Miral’s physical abuse in jail cell is disturbing, and her interlude with a cousin who has a kind-hearted Jewish girlfriend (played by Schnabel’s daughter Stella) is tender, yet these strands don’t really play out. Miral’s life brushes against terrorism, but this is also a false start. Meanwhile, there’s virtually no mention of religion’s role in the conflict, or how it might touch Miral and her friends.

One character, late in the film, says, “One state, two states, I don’t care—I just want to live a life.” That’s a plaintive sentiment that might have made a truly compelling movie, which “Miral” is not.

Rubber and Empty Quarter. “Can kill with its fiendish vibrations.”

When We Leave. “Unfortunately the idea of the ‘honor killing’ seems to be flourishing.”

Soul Surfer. “Made for church auditoriums.”

On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Steve Scher about the flurry of movies that present questionable realities on screen, and to what extend we’re supposed to figure them out. Among the titles mentioned: Source Code, Sucker Punch, The Adjustment Bureau, Shutter Island, but especially Certified Copy. You can listen here; the movie bit kicks in around the 15-minute mark.

It’s a strange world at my other website, What a Feeling!, with a 1986 review of Blue Velvet.