Miral (2011)
Directed by: Julian Schnabel

Premise: A story of a Palestinian girl growing up in an orphanage amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts of the late 1980s and early 90s. 

What Works: Miral is an impressive coming of age story. It is unique in that it sets its story amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and tells it from a vantage point rarely seen in a mainstream motion picture. That gives this film a degree of freshness; just as City of God brought worldwide audiences a story from the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Miral is able to present a story from within the Palestinian community and dramatize life and its struggles. Of course that alone wouldn’t be enough to make Miral a good film and this is a very good picture. Part of what makes it impressive, and further unique, is that it is a story primarily about female characters and Miral tells its story by elegantly balancing and crosscutting between the stories of several generations of Palestinian women. The earliest story begins in the mid-1950s as an upper class citizen (Hiam Abbass) forms an orphanage to care for children whose parents have died in the conflict. The middle narrative is the story of a woman (Yasmine Elmasri), abused by a mix of poor circumstances and bad choices, who gives birth to the title character, played by Freida Pinto, whose late teen years make up the third narrative. Stories with political or topical subjects often risk bending the events of the plot to fit the filmmaker's agenda and mangling the narrative in the process. Miral's story is paced very tightly and manages to provide a long temporal scope, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, and intertwines the lives of these three women without forcing the story to conform to a political agenda. The film does this in part by staying focused on the the humanity of its characters. The three leads, played by Abbass, Elmasri, and Pinto, all have a great deal of empathy. Although the film generally puts the viewer on their side it also allows the characters to make mistakes and to have very human flaws that stem from basic human desires for love, family, and a sense of home. Pinto’s character in particular has a very precarious future as she leaves the safety of the orphanage and encounters the conflict embroiling her community. Those encounters awaken a new sense of identity for her and she begins to drift toward the violent and radical resistance movements in part because of her love for a charismatic young man in that movement. The film’s challenge for Miral is a difficult one as she tries to sort out moral, political, and personal questions that have entangled themselves together and ultimately this film provides a glimmer hope that is tempered by realism and experience.

What Doesn’t: The subject matter of Miral is politically charged and that has a way of distracting from the film itself. When Miral was originally released it was attacked by many critics and other organizations. That controversy has obfuscated the merits of the film and now that it is available for home viewing, hopefully the picture will be revaluated.

DVD extras: Commentary track, deleted scenes, featurettes, a filmmaker Q&A, and trailers.

Bottom Line: Miral is a very impressive film. It goes for an epic scope but without an epic length and manages to tell a complicated story of a community dealing with culture-changing events and how the individuals within that community deal with those changes.