Sorry, Haters

This is a film about Ashade, a Syrian chemist who drives a cab in New York, and a woman who works for a TV station, and 9/11. I hesitate to say more about the characters or plot, because all of them are complex and tricky, and saying any more would lessen your experience.

What I can tell you is that the plot has a fascinating Hitchcockian twist in the middle, and an ending just about no one sees coming.

On the other hand, watching a film about Moslems, terrorism, and one truly nasty white girl left me immensely depressed. I wasn't seeing any light at the end of the tunnel, no shining sanity anywhere. Maybe that was the point.

The screening I saw featured the director/writer afterwards for Q&A, but I was so bummed, I just fled the theatre. Not a bad film per se, but disturbing and dark.

Here's a film I knew very little, if anything, about going in, found utterly compelling in the beginning, thoroughly intriguing in the middle and completely frustrated at the end as the story veered off so wildly in the third act.

That's not to say "Sorry, Haters" isn't a fascinating movie to see.

The main reason to see this is Robin Wright Penn's mesmerizing performance as a woman - Phoebe - who just keeps twisting and turning our expectations of who she is. Watching Phoebe come undone while Penn keeps her completely rational makes the character that more frightening.

Abdel Kechiche - as Ashade, a Syrian chemist working as a New York cab driver and trying to get his brother out of Gitmo - is so believable in the role. You don't doubt his anger and frustration at what's going on and you can understand why he he is who he is.

Writer-director Jeff Stanzler provides an interesting landscape of post-9/11 America. He also provides one of the scariest rationalizations a character can provide for that horrible day.

Stanzler doesn't let us get all that comfortable with the story and throws in a doozy of a twist in the middle. We never see it coming and it just makes the film that much stronger and powerful.

But then comes the denouement.

It's almost as if Stanzler just had no idea how to end his film given the circumstances in which he had placed his two leading characters. So he devises this rather ludicrous change that takes the story completely off-kilter. He just keeps going and you can sense the story going off-track. But Stanzler doesn't seem to mind and, ultimately, the film veers off course and winds up with an utterly preposterous and unconvincing finale. I was never looking for something happy; I just wanted something that I could believe.

Sorry, Haters (2005)

An emotionally intense but cinematically thin movie. I'm not sure where that leaves a viewer--I think it depends on what you want from a movie. The theme is ripe. An immigrant (a Muslim) with immigration problems meets a troubled woman (played by Robin Wright Penn) who abuses his situation. At it's most intense and personal it's moving and disturbing, and sad, if such terrible drama can just be plain old sad.

But there are improbabilities (including the way their first meeting in a cab becomes very personal, with another woman and her child, in the blink of an eye). And there is a kind of plainness to it all, the writing, the filming, the story itself, that is linear and not quite enough to keep it going. It's true, I think, that being low budget was not an issue, but even within the style it was filmed, there might have been a better sense of camera-work and editing. The one thing that pushes forward best is the acting, often conspicuous for exceeding the writing. Director and writer Jeff Stanzer deserves a nod for trying, but he's only taken this half way, was a movie.

Do I recommend this? I think only if you like Penn, like indie films about serious contemporary issues regardless of quality, or if you are interested in the theme of Muslim integration and devotion to not being integrated. It might surprise some people with its honesty and tenderness, between the long lulls. But others will sense, in the first twenty minutes, the tone of the whole movie, and might back out. For those latter, the ending is an intense surprise, and disturbing to the point of demented, so there is a need, perhaps, to stick it out, just for that five minutes. But then again, maybe not.

A kind of psychological mystery that tends toward the thriller genre that is a also finely-tuned character study that features a brilliant performance from its leading lady and--most tellingly of all--approaches how we live now and the events of 9/11/01 with an original perspective that makes that day frightening again in a whole new manner (and that's a mere portion of what you'll get), SORRY, HATERS is so shocking in so many surprising ways that I haven't stopped thinking about it for several days. It succeeds as entertainment, provocation and mind-expander, and seems to grow more powerful and mysterious the more I consider it.

Robin Wright Penn, who has helped improve movie after movie from "The Princess Bride" through "Forest Gump," "White Oleander" and "Nine Lives," reaches a new plateau here: that of taking absolute ownership of a film. She manages this despite the very fine work of the rest of the cast, which includes Sandra Oh, Josh Hamilton, Elodie Bouchez and an especially rich and beautiful performance from leading man Abdel Kechiche (who is himself writer/director of the 2005 Cesar-winning French film "L'Esquive"). The writer/director of "Sorry Haters" is Jeff Stanzler, who made the interesting "Jumpin' at the Boneyard" back in 1992, and two short films since. That this 2005 piece didn't put Stanzler on the map of big-time movie makers will remain as mysterious to me as does his movie.

I will say no more about the film, except that you might, at its conclusion, want to turn to the Special Features and watch the round-table discussion between a group that includes Tim Robbins, Mary Louise Parker and Julian Schnabel, all of whom seem as blown away by the film as was I. Certainly, for all of us, Muslims in America and a sweet phrase like "I want to give you something my parents gave me" may now resonate in quite a different manner.

This moving is very polarizing. I didn't like it, because I am an Arab and a Muslim and I felt the injustice of the taxi driver more personally the most of the audience, but my friend loved it, and thought it was thought provoking. Which it is. I will not ruin the ending for the reader, but it will shock you, so be prepared. Additionally, it isn't one of those movies that is very well balanced. In a sense, I didn't really care what Philly's motivations where in the movie, and the director's efforts at showing her as unstable were a bit heavy handed and clichéd. Other than that, the movie was fine, but not exceptional and NOT about Guantanamo.