Week of November 19, 2009, Issue #735
FILM
AMREEKA: Green card blues
Amreeka's immigrant tale offers little in the way of substance
David Berry / david@vueweekly.com
The immigrant story is pretty well-trod territory for American cinema, although that doesn't necessarily mean it's entirely without potency. Certainly for Cherien Dabis' milieux in Amreeka (Arabic for "America")—Muslim immigrants, in the time immediately following the start of the Iraq War—there's a lot of potential avenues to explore. But you still have to explore those with some kind of inventiveness, or at least cleverness, to separate your story, and Amreeka has very little of either.
The one thing it certainly has going for it is lead Nisreen Faour. A woman with the rather refreshing roundness of middle age, Faour plays Muna, a Palestinian who gets the rare privilege of a green card for herself and her son Fadi (Melkar Muallem). And just in case we were wondering, Dabis makes it rather perfectly clear why Muna should want to leave: Israeli harassment of Palestinians is summed up in the checkstops and wall that turn her short drive to her job in a bank to an hours-long ordeal. And during one particularly heinous trip across, a smart comment from Fadi earns him a frisking at gunpoint. No wonder Illinois suburbs and a house with her sister seems so attractive.
But while those parts are excusable as necessary backstory, the flatness of Muna and Fadi's new home isn't. The midwest is supposed to be a place of simple values and all, but Dabis strips things of more or less any nuance whatsoever, and dress it up in heartwarming clothes in the hopes of us not noticing. Staying with her family is apparently too easy, so Muna loses her life savings in an airport security mix-up. Her pride keeps her from telling anyone, for some bizarre reason, and, naturally, her hopes of finding similar work in the States are dashed, and she ends up at a White Castle, where she can't quite master the sales pitches. Throughout it all, she has an inexplicably indomitable spirit, though, and just enough sitcom-level humour to push through.
Things are worse, both within the film and for it, with Fadi. Predictably, he's teased and eventually outcast at school, save for his cousin Salma (Arrested Development's Alia Shawkat) and her boyfriend. But his tormentors are more ridiculous than threatening: they're so utterly clueless and frothingly racist—one of them even confronts Muna during her day job, calling Fadi "Osama"—they don't even stand up as caricatures. Not that Dabis is all that interested in really getting into those issues anyway: they seem to take a back seat to the staid humour and a burgeoning, kind-of inexplicable romance between Muna and Fadi's principal.
There is just enough of it to make this seem as though it might be political, though, just as there are enough stabs at comedy to make Amreeka seem like it might be that, and enough get-up-and-go from Muna to make her seem like a tireless immigrant eager to make it in America. But besides Faour's lively performance, there really isn't enough substance here to make the film come together. It's an easy story, told simply, hoping to maybe get you to laugh or sympathize, without the temerity to do either. V
Opens Fri, Nov 20
Amreeka
Written & directed by Cherien Dabis
Starring Nisreen Faour,
Melkar Muallem
Princess Theatre (10337 - 82 Ave)
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