Despite its various artistic failings, The Reluctant Fundamentalist was still quite an enjoyable movie. The lead actors (Riz Ahmed, Liev Schreiber) are warm, fun to watch, and give good performances, and the film’s sense of place is really strong and compelling; these attributes combine with a decently-told story (featuring a variety of interesting story concepts) to produce a film that is quite pleasing to watch and holds your attention well. It’s afterward that you feel somewhat less satisfied with the viewing experience.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a very ambitious movie. It’s primary goal is to tackle the subject of our country’s response to 9/11, and the unfortunate dual side-effects of creating additional enemies where there were none, and falsely blaming innocent people. It approaches both of these topics through the same lead character, a young Princeton-educated Pakistani yuppie making shit-loads of money on Wall Street, who gets swept up a little bit in the post-attack paranoia. Unfortunately, it is inherently contradictory to tackle both topics with the same character. If the story winds up proving his innocence, then we didn’t create an additional enemy, did we? And if he’s really guilty, we were right to persecute him, weren’t we? In this way, the film’s cleverly ambiguous plotting really just allows Mira Nair to avoid taking a stand on the issues.

As a piece of political art, there is something about this movie that feels decidedly “too little, too late.” The situation has moved so far beyond what is addressed in the movie that it feels a bit quaint and dated, even irrelevant at times. Our president now murders anyone he wants (including American citizens,) anywhere in the world, using flying robots. No proof of wrongdoing is needed, there’s no judicial or congressional review, there’s no public transparency, and any additional accidental deaths cause by this process are unimportant. And what’s more, Americans don’t have a problem with this! As long as our leader is the one flying the death robots, it’s a non-issue in this country. In light of this, one notices a certain lack of resonance when this film asks us to get all bent out of shape about the lead character being (rather respectfully) cavity-searched in an airport.

But I still think the movie might have worked if it was not for two additional problems. First, the film’s set up was not adequate: it’s paced too slowly, and with too much dead time on screen; the characters are not introduced properly; and the complex and horrifying sociopolitical context of current-day Pakistan (especially the warped and very unhealthy relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan) is not even cursorily sketched, let alone properly integrated into the story. This results in a certain hollowness to the main storyline, a certain superficially, in that the viewer has no context to evaluate the present-tense narrative. Minus this texture, the story quickly reduces  to something like: “Is he a shifty A-Rab, or isn’t he?”

The second problem concerns the larger, flashback narrative: I did not believe that the Pakistani yuppie would have given up his guaranteed path to joining the ultra rich over the few minor things which happened to him – he’s cavity searched one time at an airport, some redneck calls him “Osama”, his girlfriend is a bit racially insensitive (there’s more than one fish in the sea, dude!), and as part of his job he has to shut down a Turkish publisher who published his father. Come on! You think this Princeton robot is going to turn his back on eight figures a year over crap like this? It’s not like he was tortured for a decade at a CIA black site, with all his teeth knocked out and his balls fried off! I think the writing in the flashback sections was fundamentally flawed: either make him less successful and less gung-ho about predatory capitalism, or make the racial harassment worse. This guy just seemed too fat and happy in America – his supposed change of heart just doesn’t ring true.

There was in addition a third problem: Kate Hudson. First of all, she’s just an appalling actress! But secondly, she was way too old for him in the story, and to make matters worse the years have not tread kindly on her! So this romantic sub-story, which was linked to the racial harassment narrative, was distractingly unbelievable.

I’m not sure what to say in conclusion about The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It has its good points. It’s not a bad movie, indeed it’s quite enjoyable. But as a political film offering artistic commentary on post-9/11 America and American policy, it strikes me as rather half-baked, naive, and even a bit gutless. Do we really need yet another voice proclaiming that the depth of feeling on both sides is impossible to ever sort out, come to terms with, and resolve?