Fatwa (2006)

Directed by: John Carter | 92 minutes | drama, thriller | Actors: Lacey Chabert, John Doman, Lauren Holly, Angus Macfadyen, Rachel Miner, Ryan Sands, Jayson Warner Smith, Roger Guenveur Smith, Noa Tishby, Elizabeth Uhl, Billy Warlock, Mykelti Williamson

If John Doman (here as John Davidson, but better known as Rawls in “The Wire”) hadn’t been in ‘Fatwa’, George W. Bush would have put in the best acting performance here. ‘Fatwa’ (director: John Carter) opens with a patriotic television speech by President Bush, in which President Bush treats the viewer with his well-known concerned look to elementary concepts such as ‘freedom’ and ‘oppression’. The rest of the film is a hodgepodge of scenes that together try to resemble a story. With some good will and puzzling you might be able to find out the real intentions of the makers afterwards, ‘Fatwa’ itself makes it very difficult.

For obscure reasons, ‘Fatwa’ begins and ends with what must pass for a school class delving into the theme of terror. There’s a lot of ‘pretend’ throughout the film: Maggie Davidson, for example, (poor Lauren Holly) must be a celebrated senator, but in that position gets no further than—again—a lousy television speech. For the rest, she does something with strangulation sex, argues with her husband John Davidson over the phone (frustrated with her thwarted orgasm) and sits screaming in a taxi driven by the apparently mentally disturbed Samir (Roger Guenveur Smith, whose drool just hasn’t run out yet). The drunkard’s camera and the alternately over- and underexposed image give the impression of a hip, contemporary film style (Tony Scott!). But the director of photography on duty seems so absorbed in that crazy device in his hands that he forgets that a movie is about the actors, about the story, about what happens. The camera regularly loses sight of such elements.

‘Fatwa’ itself pretends it is a film that is really ‘about something’, including by Mr. President himself and by ingeniously (or unnecessarily complicated) tying together various storylines of the Davidson family. But what exactly is ‘Fatwa’ about? Revenge? The degenerate man? Freedom? Boontje comes for his wages? And why do the makers choose this staggering way of approaching such themes? Even if the credits are already running, the answers are a mystery. However, as long as a movie like this is exciting, it shouldn’t matter that much. But the alternately incomprehensible and incomprehensibly clichéd course of the scenes takes all the tension out of it in advance. Unless you just like to fall from one surprise to the next.