TOWELHEAD (2007)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: Alan Ball

SCREENWRITER: Alan Ball

FILM STARS: Summer Bishil, Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bellom, Peter Macdissi, Matt Letscher

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Alicia Erian

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Headline

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 2008

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 2005

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Drama

WORDS: The book had some nuance to it as it tells the matter of fact occasionally comedic coming of age story for a 13 year old Lebanese-American girl.

Jasira is sent from her Euro-American mother’s home in Syracuse, New York to live with her strict Lebanese father in Houston, Texas and encounters (sexually) older and young men, and (emotionally) older and young women. Her sexual awakening and emotional growth touches on issues of obsession, love, consent, privacy and race.

The book, written by Alicia Erian, born to an Egyptian father and American mother of Polish descent, is slight. There is some insight though never, despite ethnic slurs, do you feel that the character is Lebanese American.

The book is almost too slight. She is an innocent like Chance the gardener (from Being There) amongst sharks. She is naïve, more naïve than I would have thought but then she will go and do something so illogically out of character for a naïve girl. There are many contradictions without motivations. In other works this may be interesting, but here it just seems to be and excuse to bounce around and inject sex into the story. And, apart from the occasional slur, there is little in the way of ‘race” issues. She seems to be the only Lebanese-American girl in America, or, at least, Houston. But, it’s all window dressing, we don’t really know the girl at the end not as a Lebanese-American nor as a teenager.

But, it’s easily readable and at least looks at a group (children of non Anglo migrants) not overly represented in recent American literature.

I didn’t expect much from director – screenwriter Alan Ball. And he lived up to my expectations.

He was the creator, writer and executive producer of the glossy less than meets the eye TV series Six Feet Under (2001 – 2005) and True Blood (2008 – 2014) and wrote the vastly overrated film American Beauty (1999) a film full of stereotypes with sledge hammers. Towelhead the book might not flesh out the characters but there was attempted nuance. Ball’s film is all characters as middle brow philosophical ciphers who seem to have (at least in the case of the American ones) dropped in out of an American 50s sitcom.  Worse still his (more narrow) American Beauty world view is overlaid over the author’s material … no one is normal (unless they are gay). Taking a position is one thing, but blinkered single mindedness is something altogether different. How anyone could be impressed by Balls’ obvious banality I don’t know. Gidget ends up a more fully formed character.

Even worse is the predictability of actions which turns to boredom. Just like in American Beauty, unless you lived under a rock or in a convent every stereotyped character does as you would expect them to do.

The cast, especially Eckhart are fine under the circumstances and make the film look (just) better than it is.

What Douglas Sirk could have done with this material!

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