Palestine to Podunk

Likeable immigrant drama Amreeka mixes
social realism with melodrama

DISARMING DISCOVERY: Nisreen Faour

By MALCOLM FRASER

A hit at this year’s Sundance festival, Amreeka is the first feature from writer-director Cherien Dabis. Muna (Nisreen Faour) is a middle-aged divorcée, bank clerk and mother of a 15-year-old son, Fadi (Melkar Muallem). As if all that wasn’t frustration enough, she also lives in the West Bank, where Israeli checkpoints make her daily commute a humiliating pain in the ass. So when she successfully applies for a U.S. green card, she figures she and her son can get a new lease on life. But the post-9/11 USA, to no one’s surprise but her own, has its own set of challenges for recent Arab immigrants.

Mother and son touch down in exurban Illinois, where they crash with relatives—Faour’s strong-willed sister Raghda (Hiam Abbass, The Visitor, Paradise Now), her beleaguered husband Nabeel (Yussuf Abu-Warda) and a trio of daughters, notably teenage troublemaker Salma (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat). Faour has to take a job slinging burgers at a White Castle (which gets a much less rosy portrait here than in the first Harold and Kumar flick), and Muallem has to deal with ignoramus bullies and the challenging intricacies of American high-school fashion trends.

With a background growing up in Jordan and Ohio, Dabis is uniquely qualified to tell this story, and she does so in a populist style of filmmaking that mixes Ken Loach-style social realism with dollops of melodrama worthy of Tyler Perry. The humour is occasionally cheap and the plot points a little too tidy, and then the story just kind of tapers off instead of resolving per se. And as is unfortunately all too common these days, the film is filled with multiple, underdeveloped characters instead of focusing on a smaller number and fleshing them out.

But in spite of all this, the film is redeemed by its cast. Faour in particular is a great discovery, a most likable star with a realistically unglamorous look and a disarming smile. The look on her face when she finds out that her son’s kindly principal is Jewish, and has to silently rejig her own prejudices, is one of Amreeka’s few subtle moments and one of its strongest. Her performance overcomes the film’s flaws and makes it generally very hard to dislike.

AMREEKA OPENS THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 30