Artist/filmmaker/pajamas-lover Julian Schnabel is not one to shy away from the depressing, the up-hill and non-fiction narratives.
His most lauded film — 2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — was an adaptation of magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir, detailing his life after a stroke suddenly left him speechless and paralyzed (only his left eyelid retained any semblance of mobility).
Schnabel’s follow-up, 2010’s Miral, is also a biographical account, this time of a young Palestinian woman learning and growing amid the hardships and restrictions of Israeli military-occupied Jerusalem.
Miral’s reception however, could not have been more different from that of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s.
When the film premiered last Sept. at the Venice Film Festival, reviews were scathing.
Now, several months later, Miral holds a horrific 16 percent rating on the aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and has grossed less than $900,000.
Could a film with such high profile personnel — backed by The Weinstein Company — really be that bad?
Yes, sadly, it can.
Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian journalist, adapted the screenplay from her own novel, which is a largely autobiographical look into her youth in and around her time spent at the Dar Al-Tifel Institute.
If you’re wondering what this particular institute is, don’t worry.
The film spends the first 40 minutes painting a random and incomplete history of its founding.
That the movie’s namesake/protagonist doesn’t even appear until almost halfway through the film is a perfect example of how, despite the makers’ intentions, Miral spreads itself too thin.
The film opens with a funeral before jumping back to a 1948 Christmas function run by an Americanized Vanessa Redgrave, played by Bertha Spafford, who oddly appears to retain her English accented inflections. (Her screen time can’t total more than two minutes.) Eddie (Willem Dafoe) is her nephew, a UN type.
But our focus is meant to rest upon Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), a Palestinian woman who later comes across 55 orphaned children hanging out in the street.
The audience doesn’t really know what’s going on because Schnabel, for some reason, has made the “artistic” executive decision to take away the subtitles while the hoard exchanges words with Husseini in Arabic.
Husseini takes them home and feeds them, and after some time, these 55 children grow into more.
New digs are involved, Dafoe’s character reappears to lend a hand and the Dar Al-Tifel Institute is established.
Then, all of a sudden, a Tarantino-like character title drops down on the screen, announcing the arrival of “Nadia.”
Nadia, fed up with the sexual abuse she suffers at the hands of her employer’s husband, escapes to become a belly dancer. One day she socks a woman on a bus and is carted off to jail.
Jail seems to mean more characters like “Fatima,” a nurse who maybe killed someone while watching a Polanski movie in theaters.
Her purpose in the film is not entirely clear. At this point, Miral is shaping up to be a Middle Eastern Robert Altman movie, if Altman decided he couldn’t allow each character more than 10 minutes of screen time.
Somewhere down the line, Nadia has a child, Miral, who we meet when she is seven years old.
Shortly thereafter, Nadia — not so sane, at this point — frantically demands that her husband tell her of Miral’s whereabouts, when she is only at school.
Nadia then proceeds to drown herself in the ocean. Her husband sends Miral away to school at the Dar Al-Tifel Institute.
So, now that Schnabel’s spent an hour getting all of that hubbub out of the way, we can get down to the supposed heart of the story, which more or less transpires in 1988.
Miral, now 17 (played by Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto), is assigned by an aged Husseini to teach at a Palestine refugee camp. Having spent most of her formative years enclosed safely within the institute’s walls, the harsh reality of her people’s struggle absolutely shocks her.
Schnabel includes both documentary footage and reenactments in his illustration of the longstanding and violent Arab-Israeli conflict.
The situation only worsens for Miral, as she soon falls in love with a Palestinian militant whose terrorist plots get her into trouble with the law.
All the while, she fights to understand her people’s plight, while simultaneously staying true to Husseini’s educational and peaceful teachings.
The most incredible contradiction accomplished by Miral is that, in spite of the significant and engrossing nature of its subject matter, it manages to be incredibly boring.
The film is not at all cohesive as it jumps throughout time, never once properly fleshing out any of the storylines it ineffectively juggles.
The political overtones become undertones; the conflict’s presence is only truly felt in fits and starts.
The imagery is beautiful and the acting is perfectly fine, but the film lacks overall direction.
Its ambitious aims — attempts to capture several layers of the Palestinian struggle — are ultimately the film’s undoing. Miral also neglects to examine the Israeli perspective.
The inclusion of a young Jewish woman (played by Schnabel’s daughter, Stella) who is in love with a Palestinian man, gives negligible insight into the so-called enemy’s mind.
By the film’s close, the quantity of underdeveloped characters was mindblowing.
Even though their film was an absolute letdown, Schnabel and Jebreal can at least walk away from the production basking in the light of their newly found romantic relationship — which led Schnabel to divorce his second wife. Love truly does conquer all, even talent. Isn’t that nice.
Miral is currently playing at The Charles. Don’t run, don’t walk. Don’t see it at all.
