Here’s the question which, if you’re going to make a film for a
Western audience about jihadist suicide bombers, you
really do have to answer. Why do they do it? That may sound just
the tiniest bit categorical, but I don’t see any way around it. The
behavior, from our point of view is so bizarre and horrifying —
like the frequent claim from the bombers’ theorists and apologists
that they “love death” as we in the West love life — and the
nature of their grievance so obscure that you can’t just show them
blowing themselves and others up without further explanation. So
then, here’s how the makers of The War Within explain why
that movie’s suicide bomber does it. Turns out he’s a mild-mannered
and non-political, non-religious engineering student who one day,
while minding his own business on the streets of Paris, is abducted
by an American snatch squad, flown to Pakistan and tortured to
within an inch of his life, all because his brother took part in an
anti-American demonstration — in which, by the way, the brother
was shot dead by Pakistani police.
Well, it’s easy to see how that would radicalize a fellow. But
that’s just the trouble. It’s too easy. What we really want to see
is how the ones who weren’t kidnapped and tortured by the
Americans — like, say, Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi — became radicalized. For even if the wicked
Americans tortured assiduously day and night every innocent,
non-political Muslim they could lay our hands on, they couldn’t
begin to process enough jihadis to fill up the ranks of
those who blow themselves up, or who actively sympathize with those
who do. I’ll go way out on a limb here and say these guys must be
coming from somewhere else besides American torture chambers. But
this film hasn’t got a clue where. On the contrary, Joseph Castelo,
who directed and co-wrote the screenplay with the film’s star, Ayad
Akhtar, and Tom Glynn, is determined to put nearly all his
motivational eggs in this one basket.
“You are Americans now,” writes the film’s hero, Hassan (Mr.
Akhtar), to his Pakistani-American hosts before going forth, as he
thinks, to do his Samson routine in Grand Central Station. “Yet the
life you love is born from the blood of your brothers throughout
the world; your government takes actions of which you are unaware.
But ignorance is not innocence.” Are these “actions” meant to
include something more than snatching innocent Muslims off the
streets and torturing them? If so, we are not told.
At one point, Hassan explains his hatred of America to Ali
(Varun Sriram). the hero-worshiping young son of his American
hosts, in terms of a parable. Suppose the neighbors came to your
house one day and told you to get out of it and move to the
backyard because they wanted it for themselves. Then suppose that
they told you you had to move out of the backyard because they had
found oil there. Wouldn’t you fight back? One can understand the
standard academic model of “imperialism” behind this analogy, but
it is less clear what imperialistic acts he is referring to.
Britain in Pakistan? Israel in Palestine? But why, then, blow up
Americans? And there is no oil in either place. Iraq is even more
far-fetched. Who is having to move out there except Saddam Hussein
and — as everyone now agrees — the Americans themselves as soon
as possible, if not sooner?
It’s natural enough, I suppose, to show a suicide bomber who is
a little hazy in his thinking, but then you would expect a bit of
detachment on the part of the film-makers, a somewhat critical view
of a killer so misguided. Not here. Hassan is the film’s hero, and
if the film-makers stop just short of advocating suicide bombing
themselves, they regard the bomber with almost perfect sympathy.
This is a pity because we want to like him too. For all the movie’s
conceptual flaws, its characters — including not only Hassan and
Ali but Ali’s father, Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), mother, Farida
(Sarita Choudhury) and Aunt Duri (Nandana Sen) — are so attractive
and engaging that they are almost enough to save it. Like Sayeed,
we want Hassan to marry Duri, as the two are obviously powerfully
attracted to each other, and become part of the family. Even when
Hassan spurns Duri from him, ostensibly on the grounds that “I
can’t be with you because you have been with other men,” it seems
more tragic than cold-hearted — and potentially as a part of the
much larger tragedy involved when a traditional culture finds
itself surrounded by the terrifying freedoms, social and sexual, of
America.
But the film has no real interest in that subject, and in the
end comes off as little more than a bit of crude anti-American
propaganda. It’s a matter for much regret as in so many ways — not
only the fine performances of the actors but the visually
impressive camera work of the director of photography, Lisa Rinzler
— it promises so much more.
