Towelhead (2007): C-

Alan Ball returns to nasty, vile, repressed suburbia with Towelhead, an adaptation of Alicia Erian’s novel that the American Beauty writer fashions into another cartoonishly broad, repulsive vision of middle-class life. In a cookie-cutter Texas planned community in the early ‘90s (an arbitrary time frame employed mainly for its slightly dated outfits), thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira (a understated Summer Bishil) finds herself the sexual object of desire for both her Army reserve neighbor – husband and father Travis Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart) – as well as an African-American classmate named Thomas (Eugene Jones III) who pursues Jasira after apologizing for calling her “sand-nigger.” Seemingly every man wants to fondle, screw and/or shave the pubic hairs of Jasira, and Ball goes a very small way toward suggesting that these men’s relationships with her function as a means of channeling racist and chauvinistic urges. Towelhead, however, is first and foremost a grotesquerie. And thus, it subsumes any investigation of the way intolerance and perversion inform erotic desire – or the way that Jasira conflates this sexual attention with love and acceptance, which aren’t provided by her abusive Lebanese father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) – in favor of presenting a cavalcade of ugly caricatures fit for sensationalized scenarios. Ball attempts to prove himself an equal-opportunity offender by casting all of his characters (save for Toni Collette’s pregnant earth-mother and her conveniently Arabic-fluent husband) as noxious. Yet given that his plot generally strives for either pseudo-shocking graphicness (bloody tampons, bloody panties, porn fantasies) or wannabe-scathing “comedy” (involving Gulf War I, oil, scary black people) – two modes that frustrate rather than facilitate any real engagement with the racial/gender/cultural issues lurking beneath the surface – the film turns out to be merely a stridently reductive portrait of the messy clash between puberty and prejudice.