Amreeka

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"Coming to America" films in the past have typically been packaged as either broad comedy (such as uh, Coming to America) or relentlessly bleak dramas (In America) and tend to gravitate towards the urban centers of the United States. Amreeka (marking the debut of L-Word writer-director Cherien Dabis) posits a recently divorced, non-religious Palestinian woman and her son embarking on a journey to the far more recognizable landscape of contemporary American life: the suburbs.

After Muna and her teenage son Fadi are granted visas through a lottery program, they spend precious little decision-making time to determine that their once comfortable life under occupation is becoming so exceedingly dangerous and lacking in opportunity that taking a chance on a new beginning is their only viable option. They move in with her sister in the outer boroughs of Chicago where Muna looks for work as an accountant and Fadi starts at a new high school. Unfortunately, her accent and his timid nature are immediately deemed unacceptable in each of those worlds, leaving her working at a White Castle restaurant and him getting beat up on a regular basis.

Set in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Amreeka feels like a script that started out as a comedy and over the inevitable revision process became exceedingly focused on underlining each character's difficulty. There are great moments of levity during Muna's time at White Castle hanging out with her high school drop out co-workers. And a relationship forged between Muna and a bank manager that didn't hire her are affectionate, while underscoring that even 'good white people' are powerless in a structure of institionalized racism.

And where in similar fish-out-of-water stories we would see one place's beauty emphasized -- here even a middle-class life in Bethlehem looks like something akin to the Dust Bowls and the Illinois suburbs aren't much more appealing. Even the food that brings the two families together at the dinner table looks gray and has a gruel-ish quality. These are all bold choices made by the film-maker to emphasize that these people are caught in a world where black and white thinking has created a gray habitat of invisibility.

Ragda's teenage daughter Salma (played by the meta-racial Alia Shawkat, stellar) is an American teenager trying to forge an adult identity in a world she feels constantly threatened by -- as opposed to her recently transplanted cousin Fadi, who starts out confident and sweet but at the first bit judgment from the boys at school goes completely off his axis. And of course, all of their struggles are contrasted against the mouth-breathing, white suburbanites happy to spout off Bush-ian talking points and go about their business.

There is, as the great Tim Gunn would say, a matchy-matchy quality to some of the conflicts and themes being presented in Amreeka: the youngest daughter is first made to live in a cordoned off section of her bedroom by her domineering sister before eventually being kicked out all together. And there's a physical starkness between the two female adults in the story: ex-pat Ragda is thin, judgmental, non-communicative and excessively romantic about her homeland, i.e. the physical and psychological embodiment of American foreign policies; Muna is zaftig, slightly daffy, utterly affable and faces all adversity with a desire to nurture -- representing a can-do spirit that gets sterilized before being written down as history.

Any tonal misgivings aside, Amreeka is a charmer of a film that boldly walks the line in dealing with the hard hitting issues of the day in a way that is accessible, hopeful and compassionate.

DVD extras include deleted scenes, outtakes and Dabis's short film "Make a Wish."

See also: The Namesake,, The Visitor, The Slums of Beverly Hills.