Towelhead

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***

Alan Ball has an axe to grind, possibly several axes to grind. After many years toiling as a sitcom writer for shows like Cybil and Grace Under Fire, he won an Academy award for writing the suburban exegesis American Beauty, created the HBO series Six Feet Under, an at times cruelly bleak dramedy about a family-run funeral home, and has now developed True Blood, a Southern Gothic melodrama television series wherein vampires and humans reside in strained coexistence. So it makes a certain kind of sense that Towelhead, his feature film debut as a director, would contain elements of racism, child rape, pornography, interracial dating, teen sex and militarism -- all under the umbrella of comedy.

Jasira (Summer Bishil) is a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl struggling to reconcile her burgeoning appreciation for sex with the messages being sent by her strict father (Peter MacDissi) and narcissistic mother (Maria Bello), still bitter from their divorce many years prior. Jasira's a sweet, smart girl; despite being at a new school and anti-Arab racism bubbling up as the first Gulf War rages in the background, she quickly makes friends with a female classmate who chastely lusts after a teacher, and a boy who is the only other non-white student at their school. But with her father working long hours it's the friendship of her adult neighbors Jasira seeks out. Ensconsed in their Houston suburb on one side are a pervy, redneck reservist and his obedient wife (Aaron Eckhart and Carrie Preston) and on the other side the war protesting do-gooders (Toni Collette and Matt Letscher) who wish to protect Jasira from harm but wind up causing more problems with their meddling.

The performances are uniformly stellar. Macdissi (in a complete turn from his role in Six Feet Under as the egotistical art teacher Olivier Castro-Staal) is a real revelation as Jasira's father balancing his old-fashioned ideas of child rearing with the total alienation he feels from his daughter's complicated female pubescence. Maria Bello imbues a small, completely unsympathetic role with her typical amber glow that prevents the mother from being written off as a shrew. And it will comfort viewers to know that Summer Bishil was of age at the time of filming. Not only does it makes the sexual scenes marginally less squirmish but Bishil elegantly grounds her character with an understanding of the insecurity and stubborness of adolescence.

Where the film stumbles is with the recurrent problem facing black comedies: mixing melodrama and sarcasm can turn traumatic human experiences into glib voyeurism. But Ball is clearly committed to telling the story of a young woman dealing with sexual abuse and overt racism who is neither destroyed by it nor turned into some heart-tugging, schmaltzy hero. She's a normal girl who one can believe will go on to lead a reasonable life, a huge step up from the the drooling catatonics most sexual assault victims are depicted as.

See also: Happiness, Lakeview Terrace, Georgia Rule, Fat Girl, Thirteen, The Wackness, Virgin Suicides, Hard Candy.