Towelhead is worth another look

TOWELHEAD examines a young girl's sexual awakening in an extremely dysfunctional family--and community. Summer Bishil stars as Jasira, a 13-year-old girl being shuttled between her mother's (Maria Bello as Gail) home in Syracuse and her father's (Peter Macdissi as Rifat) in a suburban Houston cul-de-sac. Rifat, a Lebanese American, is overprotective of his daughter, who makes extra money by baby-sitting for neighbor Zack (Chase Ellison). But when Zack's father, Travis (Aaron Eckhart), a National Guardsmen waiting to be called to serve in Iraq, begins taking an unhealthy interest in Jasira, another neighbor, Melina (Toni Collette), becomes suspicious and befriends Jasira, who is suddenly trapped in a grown-up world she might not understand as well as she might think. Bishil, who was 18 at the time the film was shot, is excellent as Jasira, playing the complex character with both charm and trepidation; her scenes with Macdissi and Eckhart are filled with different kinds of tension that never let up. Alan Ball's script, based on the novel by Alicia Erian, takes on racism, bigotry, underage sex, patriotism, suburbia, adolescence, terrorism, first love, and, most of all, the meaning of family in an ever-changing world.

Jasira is the daughter of divorced parents who can barely tolerate each other. When her American mother, Gail (Maria Bello), discovers that her boyfriend Barry (Chris Messina) has been getting too cozy with Jasira, she sends the girl packing to her much stricter Lebanese father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), a NASA employee who is clearly torn between two cultures. Sometimes abusive, occasionally affectionate and protective toward his daughter, he's the most compelling character in the book and the film. Macdissi gives a rich, revealing performance as a man whose daughter comes to represent everything about American culture that drives him wild. Yet he has far more in common with his Houston neighbors than he will admit, including his Christian faith and his contempt for Saddam Hussein. Other intriguing characters keep popping up, though Toni Collette and Matt Letscher are not given quite enough screen time as an apparently enlightened neighbor couple. The same goes for Eugene Jones as Jasira's boyfriend and Carrie Preston as Vuoso's clueless wife. It becomes particularly unnerving when the predatory adult, Mr. Vuoso (superbly played by Aaron Eckhart), takes the self-possessed Jasira (talented 18-year-old Summer Bishil) out to dinner, and she startles him by drinking a margarita prepared for him. "I'm not your daughter; I'm your girlfriend," she informs him. Ball takes great care to show how his subsequent behavior toward Jasira, as heinous as it is, comes from a place he confuses as genuine love. And the girl, starved of any real emotional connections and bewildered by this new aspect of life she has encountered, mistakes sexual abuse for something deeper and more profound. Also in the mix is another neighbor (Collette), a very pregnant woman who suspects something untoward is happening (indeed, it's called statutory rape) and invites Jasira to visit in her home and gives her a copy of a book resembling Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The story builds to a feverish pitch and then never reaches a satisfactory conclusion. But while it’s onscreen, the film moves, incites, and jabs, all while reminding us how difficult it is to grow up female and sane in this world. This one was rather intriguing and deserves another look. A strong 4 on my "Go See" scale.