Consider the assaultive title just the tip of the big screwed-up iceberg that is Towelhead, Alan Ball's disturbing portrait of a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl's coming-of-age in a Texas suburb during the Gulf War. Bloody tampons, porn, pedophilia and racial epithets are just a sampling of the viscera offered up in only the first half of this gruesome opus. Then, for the piŠce de résistance, Ball throws a dead kitten into the plotline. It's not the first time Ball has taken interest in the less elegant details of American life - he wrote the screenplay for the twisted American Beauty - but that film limited its pedophilia to one character's unrequited fantasy. In this case, Ball ups the ante and takes the audience into the center of a very much requited romance between Jasira (Bishil), the adolescent girl at the center of the narrative, and Travis (Eckhart), the macho, patriotic neighbor and Army reservist who preys on her as a way to heat up his tepid suburban life.
Ball offers up the romance between Jasira and Travis as a half-baked Freudian explanation for American involvement in the Gulf War, where flagpoles represent phalluses and the young Jasira represents an exotic land to be pillaged. But Ball ultimately bites off way more than he - or the audience - can chew. A parade of secondary characters comes and goes, with most characters abusing Jasira either emotionally or physically. For all the depravity onscreen, it's surprising how many genuinely funny moments manage to pop up, but spurts of dark humor aren't enough to round the movie out. Characters are so swiftly drawn and emotionally lacking that the portraits offered by the film end up being unfair to both white American suburbia and the Arab-Americans who have to deal with it.
