Muslim-Jewish identity crisis
THE new movie The Reluctant Infidel is about a Muslim man who finds out he is adopted and Jewish.
FILM REVIEW: THE RELUCTANT INFIDEL
Reviewed by Adam Kamien
Rating: **
FOR the best part of a century, Hollywood has often been guilty of portraying Muslims as nefarious thieves speaking a generic, throaty gibberish that spells extreme danger for the peace-loving and pure of heart.
Their depiction in films as barbarous and sub-human has taken on black-face proportions and in post-September 11 America, sympathy seems to be at a low ebb.
This is nothing new, however. Muslims have been one of the accepted representations of expendable evil in American films going back as far as the silent film era. After World War II, the torch was passed to the Germans, then the Russians during the Cold War, and now, as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq rage, back to the Muslims — generally played by Israelis or Indians these days.
As a result of massive Muslim migration to Europe, the ledger is changing in other parts of the world, particularly the UK.
Two examples are The Reluctant Infidel, about a Muslim man who finds out he is adopted and Jewish, and Four Lions, a screwball comedy about four homegrown Jihadis in London. Both films tackle issues of assimilation of Muslims in the Islamic diaspora, prejudices and extremism; both are directed by respected comedians; both use humour to make their point; both challenge accepted stereotypes. But all things are not equal.
Four Lions is a daring and subversive genre-buster, directed with inflammatory disregard for cultural sensitivity or sentimentality. The Reluctant Infidel, written by Jewish comedian David Baddiel, is not so brave. In fact, it is totally non-committal fare, clumsily straddling the line between political correctness and irreverence, and succeeding only in trotting out a series of trite stereotypes.
In the film, Omid Djalili plays Mahmud, a secular Muslim who is about as spiritual as a strip joint and despises hard-line, Jihad-touting extremists. So when his son Rashid (Amit Shah) gets engaged to the daughter of a fundamentalist cleric, Mahmud is predictably perturbed.
While all this is going on, Mahmud finds some documents in the apartment of his recently deceased mother, which show he was adopted and that his birth name was actually Solly Shimshillewitz — Mahmud is Jewish.
He tracks down the man he believes to be his father but Mr Shimshillewitz is on his deathbed and his rabbi (played by Matt Lucas of Little Britain fame) believes the shock could kill him. He tells Mahmud (for some unbeknown reason) that he has to learn how to be more of a Jew before he can see his birth father.
Mahmud befriends local Jew Lenny (Richard Schiff), who coaches him on how to kvetch and the finer points of Jewish humour.
The premise is a potentially bottomless well of culture-clash gags and comic set-ups, but Baddiel’s script barely scrapes the surface.
The film will likely resonate with anyone who has never met a Jew or a Muslim, but anyone else will likely find it tired and uninteresting.
There are some good performances (Djalili is exceptional in the lead role) and one or two chuckle-worthy moments, but amateurish narrative conventions are awkward and distracting and smack of a first-time feature writer.
Had The Reluctant Infidel taken a leaf out of the Four Lions playbook, it might have been more than a flaccid pantomime and dared to turn out something more seditious.
The Reluctant Infidel is in limited release nationally.
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