I liked Omar. I really did. My wife did also. But it just didn’t wow me quite the way I was expecting it to, or hoping it would. I was hoping for a serious artistic statement on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, a film that would take the next bold step from the excellent recent films on this subject like The Attack and The Other Son. I wanted the film Costa-Gavras would make now on this topic, something much bolder and better conceived, written, and acted than his flawed but ground-breaking Hanna K.  from 1983. Instead, Omar turned out to be more your typical action-drama – chase scenes, double-crosses, a love story, blah, blah, blah – set in the West Bank.

I want to be clear that Omar does have its good points. It’s a film that deals, however superficially, with Palestinian suffering under military occupation, a topic that definitely needs more exposure, in any form, amongst the American public. They cast extremely good-looking and charismatic actors as the lead Palestinian couple, which (let’s face it) can only help the Palestinian cause in a country as shallow as the United States. It features a somewhat twisty plot, with tension, suspense and several well-filmed chase sequences. Character development is not great, but it’s not terrible either; the dialog is not very exciting, but it is quite functional. I found the film’s ending a bit “Antonioni” for my taste, but it was a good ending nonetheless, not a cop out. I can also report that our opening-night audience, consisting of the cream of the New York intelligentsia, seemed to love this film. Indeed, they erupted in a bizarre (and somewhat inappropriate) cheer at the end.

What I found so maddening about Omar was that the history and nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is completely unaddressed and unexplored, and even its surface-level attributes are dealt with in a strangely peripheral fashion. This intellectual vacuum is filled by a disappointingly simplistic and unresolved set of conflicting stereotypes. Omar and his friends are “freedom fighters”, and the Israelis are sadistic cartoon baddies, while on the other hand, Omar and his friends are murderers, and the Israelis are defending themselves by nobly hunting terrorists. These shallow, conflicted ideas mesh perfectly with the prevalent thought patterns of lazy, self-centered, New York Times-reading intellectuals, who see this situation as an unfathomable and unresolvable cycle of trust and betrayal. Omar thus reinforces the ignorance and passivity of the privileged classes who are this film’s audience, as well as implicitly releasing them from their own culpability.

In Omar, there’s no mention of the Nakba, or how its systematic denial has shaped the events in Israel and the occupied territories over the last sixty-five years. There’s no mention of what this “occupation” actually consists of, its illegality, how it functions, and what its aims are; they don’t even address or acknowledge the aspect of the occupation that involves systematic military aggression (with tanks, missiles, and Apache attack helicopters) against civilian populations, instead making the “occupiers” look like a bunch of mentally-impaired school-yard bullies. There’s no mention of the historical evolution of the Palestinian response to the actions of the Israelis. And there’s absolutely no mention of the enormous and crucial role of the United States in all this, without which none of this shit would be happening (without constant US obstruction, there would have been a UN-backed two-state settlement implemented decades ago.) Hell, these filmmakers don’t even explore the context of the fifty-foot concrete walls we see Omar climbing over to visit his girlfriend and his childhood buddies!

What’s strange about this is that I read an interview with the director, Hany Abu-Assad, and he seemed like a really cool guy who is clearly trying to make hard-hitting films about Palestinian suffering under the occupation, even though these kinds of films make no money, leaving him constantly scraping by and with a very uncertain personal future. One can only respect and admire the guy! Hany Abu-Assad is trying to wield cinema as art to change the world! I can only conclude (quite reluctantly) that maybe he’s just not that good at his craft, although he certainly seems like he has great potential to evolve as a writer and director.

I can see why Omar won the Cannes Jury Prize this year, and I’m pretty sure the Academy will give it Best Foreign Film – it has caché via its fashionably edgy political topic, and it’s entertaining without being too intellectually or morally taxing. Sadly for Omar, this formula is not destined to score a lot of points here at Irreviews. If you want a reasonably diverting political action drama set in the Middle East, Omar is pretty good, but frankly it is no more than that. It’s certainly far from the best foreign film of the year; in fact, it’s not even this year’s best foreign film on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!