The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

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viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (***)

Morgan Spurlock’s follow-up to Super Size Me is a fun voyage around the Middle East, but it’s longer on touchy-feely we-are-the-world vibes than factual information. The whiz-bang video game graphics that dominate the beginning of the documentary are probably a better fit for a movie about visiting McDonald’s that one that’s about visiting regular folks in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Morocco. Like Michael Moore, Spurlock injects his own story (and his wife’s pregnancy) into the movie, and a bit of comedy, but he’s way less prescriptive, if also less informative. And, not to give away the ending, but he never does find Osama bin Laden.

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viewed 4/2/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 4/18/08

A Mighty Heart (**1/4)

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in early 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan. He had traveled there with his wife for a meeting he had set up with a supposed terrorist leader. Michael Winterbottom’s film is based on Mariane Pearl’s memoir, which concentrates on the efforts to learn what happened to him. There are only brief segments before and after this period, so we don’t get to know much about him except that he was a loving husband and was well-respected as a journalist. Most of the scenes are set in the villa where the Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie) stayed with Pakistani colleague Asra Nomani. Depicted is a frenzy of activity as Nomani, Journal colleagues, US security agents, and the Karachi police investigator coalesce to comfort Mariane, assist her efforts to track down the perpetrators, and deal with the worldwide media frenzy.

Altogether, the movie is earnest but uninvolving. Jolie gives a surprisingly solid, understated performance with what sounded to me like a decent French accent. Certainly you get a feel for the confusion that must have prevailed as the improvised team tries to piece together how the phony meeting was set up, interviews potential witnesses, and deals with false leads. But for the most part both the journalist/police team and the potential terrorists barely register as characters. (Archie Panjabi as Nomani makes somewhat of an impression.) People who want to understand more about the events behind the kidnapping should probably look elsewhere, as the real-time perspective means that much remains unclear as the film ends, even whether Daniel Pearl’s Jewish background was a factor in his fate.

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Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (**1/2)

Albert Brooks plays Albert Brooks, on a government mission to study Indo-Pakistani humor. The amusing premise is stretched a bit too far to sustain a feature.

The premise is the most amusing thing about Albert Brooks’s latest, his first as a writer-director since 1999’s The Muse. Brooks stars as…Albert Brooks, an out-of-work comedian actor hired by the U.S. government to find out what people in India and Pakistan think is funny. Perhaps enemy hostiles can be won over with some disarming humor. Brooks has gotten the job, he’s told, because the government’s first few choices were working. Brooks knows comedy, but nothing about research. His methodology consists of asking people, “What makes you laugh?” and putting on a show and seeing what goes over. Brooks’s dour persona is something that probably either works for you or doesn’t, but this isn’t among his better films (which would include Lost in America and Defending Your Life). His ongoing concern about being able to fill a 500-page report was funny to me; so was Brooks’s reprisal of one of his old routines, the world’s worst ventriloquist. On the whole, though, I felt that a thin idea was being stretched too far, the way I did about two other show-biz comedies, Hollywood Ending and Bowfinger.

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posted 9/17/13