Is it possible that an American-born Jew could make a good movie about Palestine? Theoretically, sure. Unfortunately, Julian Schnabel's Miral is not that film.
Let us leave aside for a moment the numerous artistic problems of the film--the Interchangeable Brown Person Casting of Indian-Portuguese Freida Pinto in the title role; the atrocious script; the mediocre directing of even veteran actors; the numerous fudges of geography (I really do not think there is a checkpoint anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem); and the many painful incidents of characters pausing to explain things for the benefit of the audience that would be perfectly obvious to any Palestinian as part of their lived experience (my favorite: one Arabic-speaking character explaining to another Arabic-speaking character what intifada means...and getting the translation wrong.) All these shortcomings are present, but Miral's deepest flaws are political.
The main story of the film takes place primarily in occupied East Jerusalem in the years between 1967 and the First Intifada. Yet through the magic of Hollywood, we're presented with an occupied Jerusalem in which the occupation is almost completely invisible in people's daily lives. In this fantasy Jerusalem, no hostile soldiers roam the streets of the Old City, outlandishly large guns slung over their shoulders, alternating between flirting with tourists and harassing the locals for sport. No crowds of women linger outside police stations waiting for news of arrested husbands, sons and brothers. No squat green police cars prowl the streets at night declaring curfew. Miral and her religious father cheerfully plant flowers in the garden at the Haram al-Sharif without ever having to pass through a phalanx of riot cops to get there.
There is Israeli violence, yes: a home demolition in a refugee camp, a demonstration met with live ammunition, and a chilling sequence in which Miral is arrested, humiliated and beaten unconscious in an Israeli police station, which feels so vividly authentic because it is a true story from author Rula Jebreal's youth. In these scenes the reality of occupied Palestine is momentarily visible through the Hollywood trappings. But the Israeli violence is always a reaction to Palestinian resistance--with the unspoken implication being that if Palestinians would stop resisting, everything would be fine.
But that is not the reality in Palestine at all. What Miral misses entirely is that Palestinian resistance is itself a reaction to the lived reality of Israeli colonization and ethnic cleansing. It's the daily, lifelong parade of insults, humiliations, difficulties, pain and suffering imposed by the occupation that fuels Palestinian resistance again and again. Palestinians don't have to do anything special to invite repression from the Israeli state. They just have to exist. Without showing the daily grind of misery and oppression that Palestinians face, Palestinian resistance becomes completely unmotivated, or motivated by abstract hatred of "the Jews"--which is exactly how Americans like their violence from Arabs.
Also missing from Miral is the mass popular character of the First Intifada, which was primarily a movement of strikes, boycotts and unarmed street protests--not unlike those sweeping the Middle East today. It was a mass movement which touched all of Palestinian society. Yet Miral manages to separate its main characters' daily lives from revolt, struggle and politics--something absolutely unheard of in Palestine. Resistance is portrayed as a marginal, exotic, minority activity, alien and separate from ordinary people's lives.
The two characters who are unambiguously positive forces in Miral's life--her adoptive father (Alexander Siddig) and teacher Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass)--are openly hostile to resistance. Not only is this politically reactionary; it's completely unbelievable. If there is one defining characteristic of life in Palestine, it's the way in which politics forces its way into every aspect of people's lives, making the most ordinary tasks into de facto acts of resistance. It's highly implausible that someone like Hind Husseini, who flies a Palestinian flag in her window (and somehow manages to get away with it in the pre-Oslo days when such an act was an arrestable offense) would berate her young students for attending demonstrations at a time when the whole of Palestinian society was in revolt.
While Miral herself frequently gives militant speeches, her forays into resistance seem naive and ineffectual and universally end in disaster. A fellow student is killed at a demonstration and the anger is directed not at the soldier who saw fit to shoot an unarmed teenage girl, but at Miral herself for being so stupid as to drag her friend along to a protest. Her fling with a vaguely-defined "PLO activist" results in arrest, torture, and alienation from her father. Throughout it all, everyone's goals and politics are vague and muddy, and Miral comes off looking stupid and manipulated. Even her wish for "one country where we can live together with equal rights" is dismissed as the silly dream of an idealistic child, as the film becomes an unabashed Oslo Accords love-fest in its closing moments.
We get a glimpse of Schnabel's politics earlier in the film, in a long, overly expositional rant against settlers as the driving force behind the occupation. By placing the blame on settlers, Schnabel lets the rest of Israeli society off the hook for the original act of colonization. This goes hand-in-hand with his strident defense of the two-state "solution," despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that it is both impossible and unjust. The blame-the-settlers-for-hijacking-our-country-which-is-otherwise-perfectly-fine logic is essentially the J Street position, and Miral is J Street politics in a movie. A component of this politics is the idea that the majority of Palestinians just want to live their lives but are being held hostage by a stubborn minority who insist on resisting and fucking everything up for everyone else who just wants to live in peace. Completely missing, of course, is the idea that Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is itself the thing that is holding back genuine peace with justice.
The final element missing from Miral is more subjective and ephemeral. Through a maudlin, directionless script and the overuse of tragic music, Schnabel manages to suck all the emotional intensity out of one of the most intense places on earth. Schnabel's Palestine is a dreary tragedy, completely devoid of the warmth, wicked humor, communal strength and indomitable spirit that most visitors fall in love with when they travel there. Completely lost is the idea that resistance (in whatever form one chooses) can be a source not just of suffering but of empowerment and joy, and that despite a seemingly endless supply of pain, Palestine is a place worth loving and fighting for.
Let us leave aside for a moment the numerous artistic problems of the film--the Interchangeable Brown Person Casting of Indian-Portuguese Freida Pinto in the title role; the atrocious script; the mediocre directing of even veteran actors; the numerous fudges of geography (I really do not think there is a checkpoint anywhere between Haifa and Jerusalem); and the many painful incidents of characters pausing to explain things for the benefit of the audience that would be perfectly obvious to any Palestinian as part of their lived experience (my favorite: one Arabic-speaking character explaining to another Arabic-speaking character what intifada means...and getting the translation wrong.) All these shortcomings are present, but Miral's deepest flaws are political.
The main story of the film takes place primarily in occupied East Jerusalem in the years between 1967 and the First Intifada. Yet through the magic of Hollywood, we're presented with an occupied Jerusalem in which the occupation is almost completely invisible in people's daily lives. In this fantasy Jerusalem, no hostile soldiers roam the streets of the Old City, outlandishly large guns slung over their shoulders, alternating between flirting with tourists and harassing the locals for sport. No crowds of women linger outside police stations waiting for news of arrested husbands, sons and brothers. No squat green police cars prowl the streets at night declaring curfew. Miral and her religious father cheerfully plant flowers in the garden at the Haram al-Sharif without ever having to pass through a phalanx of riot cops to get there.
There is Israeli violence, yes: a home demolition in a refugee camp, a demonstration met with live ammunition, and a chilling sequence in which Miral is arrested, humiliated and beaten unconscious in an Israeli police station, which feels so vividly authentic because it is a true story from author Rula Jebreal's youth. In these scenes the reality of occupied Palestine is momentarily visible through the Hollywood trappings. But the Israeli violence is always a reaction to Palestinian resistance--with the unspoken implication being that if Palestinians would stop resisting, everything would be fine.
But that is not the reality in Palestine at all. What Miral misses entirely is that Palestinian resistance is itself a reaction to the lived reality of Israeli colonization and ethnic cleansing. It's the daily, lifelong parade of insults, humiliations, difficulties, pain and suffering imposed by the occupation that fuels Palestinian resistance again and again. Palestinians don't have to do anything special to invite repression from the Israeli state. They just have to exist. Without showing the daily grind of misery and oppression that Palestinians face, Palestinian resistance becomes completely unmotivated, or motivated by abstract hatred of "the Jews"--which is exactly how Americans like their violence from Arabs.
Also missing from Miral is the mass popular character of the First Intifada, which was primarily a movement of strikes, boycotts and unarmed street protests--not unlike those sweeping the Middle East today. It was a mass movement which touched all of Palestinian society. Yet Miral manages to separate its main characters' daily lives from revolt, struggle and politics--something absolutely unheard of in Palestine. Resistance is portrayed as a marginal, exotic, minority activity, alien and separate from ordinary people's lives.
The two characters who are unambiguously positive forces in Miral's life--her adoptive father (Alexander Siddig) and teacher Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass)--are openly hostile to resistance. Not only is this politically reactionary; it's completely unbelievable. If there is one defining characteristic of life in Palestine, it's the way in which politics forces its way into every aspect of people's lives, making the most ordinary tasks into de facto acts of resistance. It's highly implausible that someone like Hind Husseini, who flies a Palestinian flag in her window (and somehow manages to get away with it in the pre-Oslo days when such an act was an arrestable offense) would berate her young students for attending demonstrations at a time when the whole of Palestinian society was in revolt.
While Miral herself frequently gives militant speeches, her forays into resistance seem naive and ineffectual and universally end in disaster. A fellow student is killed at a demonstration and the anger is directed not at the soldier who saw fit to shoot an unarmed teenage girl, but at Miral herself for being so stupid as to drag her friend along to a protest. Her fling with a vaguely-defined "PLO activist" results in arrest, torture, and alienation from her father. Throughout it all, everyone's goals and politics are vague and muddy, and Miral comes off looking stupid and manipulated. Even her wish for "one country where we can live together with equal rights" is dismissed as the silly dream of an idealistic child, as the film becomes an unabashed Oslo Accords love-fest in its closing moments.
We get a glimpse of Schnabel's politics earlier in the film, in a long, overly expositional rant against settlers as the driving force behind the occupation. By placing the blame on settlers, Schnabel lets the rest of Israeli society off the hook for the original act of colonization. This goes hand-in-hand with his strident defense of the two-state "solution," despite what seems to me to be overwhelming evidence that it is both impossible and unjust. The blame-the-settlers-for-hijacking-our-country-which-is-otherwise-perfectly-fine logic is essentially the J Street position, and Miral is J Street politics in a movie. A component of this politics is the idea that the majority of Palestinians just want to live their lives but are being held hostage by a stubborn minority who insist on resisting and fucking everything up for everyone else who just wants to live in peace. Completely missing, of course, is the idea that Israeli occupation, colonization and apartheid is itself the thing that is holding back genuine peace with justice.
The final element missing from Miral is more subjective and ephemeral. Through a maudlin, directionless script and the overuse of tragic music, Schnabel manages to suck all the emotional intensity out of one of the most intense places on earth. Schnabel's Palestine is a dreary tragedy, completely devoid of the warmth, wicked humor, communal strength and indomitable spirit that most visitors fall in love with when they travel there. Completely lost is the idea that resistance (in whatever form one chooses) can be a source not just of suffering but of empowerment and joy, and that despite a seemingly endless supply of pain, Palestine is a place worth loving and fighting for.
