REVIEW | Everything Is Privates: Alan Ball’s “Towelhead”

As with “American Beauty,” “Towelhead,” set without clear reason during the first Gulf War, is unedifyingly perched on the edge of satire; why this material requires such a strategy is beyond me, and judging by the film’s schizoid approach to character and tone, seemingly beyond Alan Ball as well. One moment, his film is indulging in Jasira’s sexual fantasies, portrayed as embarrassingly overstylized music-video daydreams, and the next it’s “daring” to show, in graphic detail, a fortysomething man groping a 13-year-old girl from behind, his hand shoved down the front of her jeans until it reemerges dripping with blood. It’s the sort of attention-grabbing stunt that one would normally have to brave a Todd Solondz movie to see (and even minus Solondz’s largely indefensible aesthetic stringency), and one that Ball means to sell as artistically viable and refreshingly dangerous. Rather, all imagery like this does is dilute whatever credibility or value “Towelhead” might have had as a portrait of alienation told from the point of view of a culturally invisible person like Jasira. Instead of trying to get into the mind of his disenfranchised young heroine, taken advantage of by others and racially demonized by society at large, Ball settles for narrative prurience and visual cliches.

With childhood’s emergence into sexual awareness all too commonly dramatized in R-rated films for adult audiences, Alan Ball never makes a compelling case with “Towelhead,” outside of his own childish provocation, why we should head back into coming-of-age territory, with its requisite tampon travails and discovery-of-masturbation scenes. Certainly his case isn’t helped by the lost Bashil, who seems only adept at either overemoting or adopting a deer-in-headlights stare, or with the rest of his cast, even Toni Collette, whose sympathetic, overprotective neighbor pops in and out of the narrative confusingly, likely a cutting-room casualty. Two hours of unremitting humiliation heaped upon a victimized teen girl, “Towelhead” is the kind of film that puts the ridiculous line “I miss looking at your magazines. They make me have orgasms,” into the mouth of a thirteen-year-old (referring to Vuoso’s stash of porn) and tries to pass it off as jarring honesty.

“Towelhead” is the dramatic equivalent of a cheap TV sitcom; yet rather than with a laugh-line, nearly every scene ends with some sort of grotesque punctuation. Basically a hateful litany of bad behavior inelegantly strung together into a moralizing allegory it vapidly posits as quintessentially “American,” Ball’s wretched pageant is precociously vile. And all that Ball can come up with to wrap up his film after two hours of cartoonish sadism is a banal “joy of life” ending set in a hospital with a newly delivered baby. How opportunistic; like Alan Ball’s career.

[Michael Koresky is co-founder and editor of Reverse Shot and the managing editor and staff writer of the Criterion Collection.]