REVIEW: Julian Schnabel Loses His Gift for Subtlety -- At Least for Now -- in Middle East Drama Miral

Julian Schnabel's Miral is a fictional (though somewhat fact-based) story set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had high hopes for the picture, since Schnabel's last feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was one of my favorite movies of the past decade. Miral is, paradoxically, both more modest and more ambitious than Diving Bell: Here, Schnabel doesn't have to face the challenge of getting inside the mind of a man who's almost completely sealed off from the world; on the other hand, he's treading into extremely sticky political territory here, and the story he's trying to tell -- in which the lives of four women intertwine, over a span of some 45 years -- is technically more complicated.

But Miral is a disappointment. Schnabel works with some wonderful actors here, among them Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe, who appear in small roles. The Israeli-born actress Hiam Abbas plays the real-life figure Hind Husseini, who, in 1948, rescued some 50 child refugees from the streets of Jerusalem and went on to found a school for Palestinian girls who'd been traumatized or orphaned by war. But so much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.

Freida Pinto also stars as a young Palestinian woman who flirts with terrorism, and she's an appealing presence. But Schnabel seems to be out of his depth in shaping the material so we know how we're supposed to feel about her. The dialogue in Miral contains many seemingly sincere declarative sentences about Jews and Palestinians living in harmony, but its decidedly pro-Palestinian sentiment is what really comes through. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, if we were talking about a filmmaker who'd taken some care in shaping his argument.

But Schnabel is out of his element here. His movie comes off as a stiff lesson plan; his gift for subtlety seems temporarily lost. While he's made at least one other film that you could certainly call political -- the 2000 Before Night Falls, in which Javier Bardem stars as the imprisoned Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas -- Schnabel seems to be delivering a brief here. He still has a painter's eye for composition, but that's not enough to make Miral come alive.

Editor's note: Portions of this review appeared earlier, in a different form, in Stephanie Zacharek's coverage of the Venice Film Festival.