Most of the conversation surrounding the alleged controversy of Towelhead, suburban satirist Alan Ball's feature directorial debut, has centered on the question of whether it is exploitative in its depiction of a young Arab-American girl's sexual awakening, with the common sentiment that Ball didn't realise how murky the waters that he was treading. Nonsense, I say. Ball knew exactly what he was doing with this film, and from the title on down he meant for this to be quite the shit-stirrer. This is a movie in which our first sight of the thirteen-year-old protagonist Jasira, played by seventeen-year-old actress Summer Bishil, is with shaving cream spread around her thighs at the edges of her panties, as she's about to have her bikini area shaved by her mom's boyfriend. You don't do that kind of thing by accident. No indeed, Ball had every intention of being the agent provocateur here, pushing the audience's buttons without mercy, and insofar as most of us have what I expect are very strong opinions about middle-aged men shaving teenager's private areas, Ball has largely succeeded. It's an open question whether getting a rise out of the audience just because you can is an inherently noble pursuit.

The greater question is what purpose he's served in doing this, and I confess myself stumped. Plainly, the thrust of the story is to explore the perils and joys of teenage sexuality and the cruel fact of racism in America (two themes that aren't necessarily so complementary as to deserve equal treatment in the same body of work; but then again, I never read the much-praised novel by Alicia Erian upon which Ball's screenplay was based), but it is wholly unclear to me why these subjects are well-served by the exploitation framework they've been given here. In other words, why do we need to get our hackles raised by the constant threat of statutory rape in order to understand how dreadful it is that children use anti-Arab slurs?

So, the plot goes something like this: shortly before the first Gulf War,Jasira gets kicked out by her mother (a woefully underused Maria Bello) over the shaving incident, and sent to live with her rigidly traditional father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi) in Houston. Without any halfway decent parent figures in her life, she latches onto their racist neighbor, Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), an Army reservist who befriends her and inadvertently kicks her blossoming hormones into high gear when she stumbles across his porn magazines and fantasises about how erotic it would be to pose naked for a photographer. At the same time, she starts to date in that coy way of young teenagers, except that the object of her affections, Thomas (Eugene Jones) is black, and her father is terrified that seeing a black boy socially will ruin her. Long story short, her relationships with both Thomas and Mr. Vuoso take a turn for the sexual, in the first case charmingly, in the second case horrifyingly.

The basic problem with Towelhead can be summed up thus: Ball is so pleased to have this situation set up where a young girl is casually despoiled by a scummy suburban dad, shocking the audience into excited chatter about the Why of it all, that he fails to observe that only the most cast-iron viewer will be paying attention to the Why whatsoever; most of us are going to be staring in dumbfounded terror at a film which treats pedophilia so very blithely. Compare this to Kubrick's Lolita, where it is immediately clear that James Mason's Humbert is a cynical shell of a human being. One never, ever gets that vibe from Eckhart's Vuoso (though, being played by Eckhart, it is inevitable that we should always find him a bit squirmy and oily), and there even appears to be some sense that the film is asking us to consider that there are always grey areas. Not in pedophilia, there aren't, but here I am playing into Ball's game, discussing the superficial controversy of the film rather than the points it's nominally trying to address. And this is precisely the fatal flaw: the controversial elements of the script overwhelm and scuttle the commentary, which isn't honestly all that fresh or insightful to begin with.

Those who've read Erian's first-person novel regularly cite its sensitivity and honesty, and the rightness with which it portrays Jasira's internal conflict. This is, as just about every other negative review has already pointed out, the difference between books and movies; books are by their nature a medium that tells, movies are a medium that shows, and telling us how Jasira feels about having sex with a much older man is not at all like showing us Eckhart gawking at a seventeen-year-old. I can only again register my amazement that Ball expected anybody to get past that point to see whatever the hell points he was making about adolescence, race and the twinned wars in Iraq.

And in doing this, he wastes a truly brilliant performance by the debutante Bishil, who is nothing less than radiant in the role. For a girl of 17 to play a girl of 13 with the mind of a woman much older is no little feat, and Bishil does it so well that you hardly even notice what's going on. I'd almost be tempted to say that Towelhead functions successfully as the character study it claims to be from the strength of this performance, the best by far in a cast of fine character actors giving their all - there's not a bad actor in the bunch, though Bello and Toni Collette, as Jasira's concerned neighbor, are both given far too little to do.

That said, there's really no overcoming obvious satire with a thick slab of "look at me!" prefab outrageousness mudded atop it. Towelhead is too eager to shock us, and it's therefore only stupidly offensive instead of cutting and insightful.

So much for Ball-the-writer, what of Ball-the-director? Frankly, I haven't the energy. I hope that if I say "obviously, this man has only directed television", you'll have an idea of the relentless, inappropriate use of close-ups and camera set-ups that feel like flat tableaux instead of moments in space which litter the film. At least Newton Thomas Sigel can demonstrate that a crack cinematographer can never be completely boring, even if he has very little do to but give people interesting and unexpected silhouettes. But outside of his contribution, this is boilerplate first-timer stuff, with nothing to break up the monotony of one shot-reverse shot conversation after another. That might be the most unfortunate part of the whole misbegotten affair; a real exploitation film would have the good taste to provide us with edgy and imaginative visual flair. Towelhead is just fake exploitation for the easily outraged and the reflexively liberal; the first to raise a stink about the film and the latter to come up with strained explanations for why it's actually brilliant. God, there's nothing that depresses me more than canned controversy.

4/10