The Israeli submission for Best Foreign Language Film, ahead of this year’s Academy Awards, was “Bethlehem,” a thriller about a young Palestinian man, with links to terrorist activities, who is secretly controlled by an Israeli handler. The Palestinian offering was “Omar,” a thriller about a young Palestinian man, with links to terrorist activities, who is secretly controlled by an Israeli handler. Who said the two sides in the conflict have no common ground? If you can share a plot with your neighbor, who knows what might yet bloom?
In the event, only “Omar” was picked as a nominee. It stars Adam Bakri as the Omar of the title: a baker by trade, and a good-looking guy, as shown by a glowering closeup at the start. But he pales beside his beloved, a student named Nadia (Leem Lubany), whose dark eyes, in a film full of interrogation, ask the most searching questions of all. She and Omar live on the West Bank, kept apart from each other by the separation barrier that slices through their neighborhood. To them, as to most Palestinians, it is a twenty-six-foot-tall insult, and Omar’s first deed is to scale the concrete bluff. To the Israelis who built it, however, it is a vital aid to security, designed to block incursions by those who wish them ill.
Omar, it turns out, is one of the wishers. That smolder we saw in the closeup was not so much romantic suspense, with Nadia in mind, as the slow burn of political frustration. So it is that, one evening, he steals a car and drives two comrades—Nadia’s brother Tarek (Eyad Hourani) and Amjad (Samer Bisharat), the smiling runt of the trio—to a vantage point, from which Amjad shoots and kills an Israeli soldier. By any measure, it’s a mad act, achieving nothing and provoking a vengeance that proves to be swift and brutal, but also spider-like in the subtlety of its means. Consider the tremendous back-to-back scenes in an Israeli jail. First, Omar, who has been pulled in as a suspect, and tortured to no effect, sits over trays of food with an older inmate, a donnish type with spectacles, a salty beard, and a crocheted taqiyah on his head, who warns him, in Arabic, of talking too much and predicts that, if the authorities break you, they will force you to collaborate in their schemes. “I will never confess,” Omar says. “Good, good,” the man replies. Second, Omar is led by guards to a shadowy room. In comes an Israeli in shirtsleeves, bare-headed, minus the spectacles, but with the beard intact. Guess who. Mild of manner, he produces a tape recorder, replays Omar’s words from the meal (“I will never confess”), and says, “That’s a confession.” Checkmate.
In short, the game’s afoot. And it is a game—a murderous one, set in motion by deep national urges of pride, anxiety, and self-determination, but a game nonetheless. Back and forth we go, across the wall, with each party dicing for advantage. Omar is turned by the Israelis (or so they believe), and set free in his own community, under orders to “bring us what we need to catch the killer.” Omar, for his part, decides to double-cross his tormentors and attack them, not realizing that they are infinitely wise to such maneuvers. And so on, with the ground forever shifting under our feet, and with everything—friendships, weaponry, sexual fidelity—up for grabs. The twists continue coiling to the final frame.
This is a Palestinian film, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, and you are in no doubt as to where his sympathies lie, or who will wind up on the losing team. What else can you hope for, the movie asks, among a people under perpetual siege? Given that attitude, it would not be surprising if “Omar” made you feel morally bullied, and yet, as with Abu-Assad’s previous work “Paradise Now” (2005), which dramatized the even more inflammatory topic of suicide bombers, that is not the legacy it leaves. For one thing, you hardly have time to get backed into a corner: “Omar” lasts ninety-eight minutes. Much of the story scampers along, as does its limber hero, who, more than once, has to negotiate the roofs and the alleyways of his home town with the law at his heels, as if in training for a local reboot of the Jason Bourne franchise. But the quieter sections, too, seem curt and peeled-back (one spell of maltreatment, in prison, is implied by nothing more than the scrape of a heavy lamp against the floor), and there is a rueful economy to the way in which the director tracks the passing of time: as Omar runs into trouble, his face keeps acquiring fresh cuts and bruises, and you wait for them to fade.
Most of the actors are novices, and though they struggle now and then with hokey dialogue, they acquit themselves with a wiry conviction, constantly glancing around for any threats. The villain is another matter. Abu-Assad’s film may be emotionally rooted in the Palestinian cause, but he has the mettle, and the sense of balance, to yield the most fertile dramatic territory to the opposite camp. Rami, the Israeli intelligence agent who deploys Omar, is brought to life by the forbidding Waleed Zuaiter. Born in Sacramento, raised in Kuwait, and schooled at George Washington University, Zuaiter is a regular on the New York stage. (In George Packer’s “Betrayed,” based on an article written for this magazine, he played an Iraqi translator.) Now, as Rami, Zuaiter is compact, steady, and impossible to outsmart—affable, too, although, as with any spymaster, you can’t be sure if yet another front is being erected. At one point, he chats with his wife and his mother on a cell phone, in Hebrew, sounding henpecked: a timely comic belittling, you assume. But then you notice that Omar, too, is watching him, and you wonder if the comedy might not be camouflage, intended to humanize the older man, humor the younger one, and thus break down his guard. Maybe it’s not Rami’s wife on the line at all, but another agent. And the lesson is, trust nothing—not your eyes, your ears, or your instincts. Whether you should trust your God, in these holy lands, is up to you.
Brick by brick, the success of “The Lego Movie” mounts up. Two hundred million dollars and counting, after a couple of weeks, is a decent start, although, at first blush, it may be hard to explain. All the main characters are Lego people, which means that their physical mobility is pretty much confined to marching straight ahead and bending stiffly at the waist, like Robert Mitchum in “The Winds of War.” They show even less range in their expressions, switching from a bewildered grimace to a shiny grin with nothing in between, like Ali MacGraw in “The Winds of War.” So where’s the appeal?
Well, our hero is Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), a construction worker who could not be more contented. He toils in a gleaming world, watching the TV programs he is told to watch, and drinking his appointed coffee; imagine if the Chaplin of “Modern Times” had loved his assembly line. As it was, he craved escape, whereas Emmet has to learn that his soul is being crushed before he can summon the need to do something about it. As you would expect, this entails a journey, wisdom culled from an elderly sage (Morgan Freeman), the snares of the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell), and a piece of non-Legoid plastic with mysterious powers. To sum up, “Blah blah blah, proper name, place name, backstory.” Such is the narrative, as outlined by Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), a new friend of Emmet’s, and it marks the moment at which “The Lego Movie,” directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, shifts from a bubblegum blast to a rich, self-conscious joke at the expense of our universal suckerdom. It is not a film about toys. It is a film about the willingness of people, as both moviegoers and consumers, to be toyed with. After all, “to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
That is Karl Marx, whom I would cheerfully have taken as a date to this movie, not least for the thrill of seeing him in chunky 3-D glasses. How cool would they look with his beard? He would, I think, have applauded the precept that is issued here—namely, that we should toss away the instructions in our Lego kits and cobble together whatever takes our fancy. (One mistake: the film proposes that dads are obsessed with cleaving to Lego rules, while their sons yearn to tip everything into a pile and get messy. In my experience, it’s precisely the other way around.) Pursued to its logical extreme, such revolutionary advice would mean never buying any new Lego but endlessly recycling our old stuff: an excellent workout for the imagination, and a nightmare for the marketing wonks at the company. Needless to say, in the wake of a very funny film, the last laugh will be theirs. Go to your Lego store, or to the Web site, and you’ll find the “Creative Ambush” package, including a biplane that’s also a Wild West saloon and a “flying kebab stand” that fires “tasty kebab flick missiles”—just the kind of loosey-goosey, left-field inventions that parents everywhere, inspired by “The Lego Movie,” would like their kids to devise. The kit retails for $39.99. It comes with instructions. ♦
