We’ve done foreign film roundups and anti-rom com roundups, and if it seems like I’m really struggling to find a common theme for these movies, well then…it’s because I am. Although technically, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Una Noche could be considered immigrant stories, and, hey, even To the Wonder has a quasi-immigrant story in a French woman coming back to her American husband’s small town. You know what, this is now “Immigrant Story Roundup,” so deal with it content nazis!
To the Wonder…Terrence Malick is a filmmaker you either love or hate, and the hate usually takes the form of “What the hell am I watching?”-style confusion. While others were bored to tears during The New World or Tree of Life, I ate those films up. Still, this is the first Malick movie I haven’t liked, and I actually think it’s trying too hard for existential significance. His singular style has never felt less coherent (I had a hard time figuring out if Ola and Ben Affleck were even still together from moment to moment) and more phoned-in. Grade: C
The Reluctant Fundamentalist…Did you know that not all Muslims are terrorists? If so, this movie doesn’t have a lot to teach you. It’s basically the story of how an “assimilated” Muslim (i.e. he shaves and drinks) gets his Wall Street dreams complicated after 9/11 and is tempted to become an extremist…except that the prejudice facing the protagonist is never really that bad, and he mostly just quits things. [The movie trying to link corporate America’s value of money to religious fanaticism feels like one of those cynical-naive points that a high school senior’s term paper would be proud to make.] Liev Schrieber (as a “journalist” who’s probably CIA), Kate Hudson (as the hero’s American girlfriend), and Kiefer Sutherland (as his sharky Wall Street mentor) all show us different sides of themselves, but I just never got as wrapped up in this movie as I should have been. And the tiresome framing device (which too many novels use, and this movie was based on one that used it too) doesn’t help. Grade: C+
Una Noche…Modern-day Cuba sucks and a trio of teenagers with complex feelings toward each other want to escape it. That’s the long and short of the movie, and even if the plot isn’t snare-drum tight, the sequences where they’re floating on a pitifully small raft to America are terrifying in their realism. Grade: B-