BEFORE: Haluk Bilginer carries over from "Rosewater:, and I made it to where I want to be, a film that uses the 9/11 terrorism at least indirectly, as some kind of plot point. I already watched the film "Worth" earlier this year, which was all about the insurance companies that figured out the compensation benefits for the families of the people who died in that terrorist event. Yeah, it was really kind of a dry subject matter for a film. I wasn't sure that I could link to that film again, so I watched it between two other films with Michael Keaton in them - maybe I should have tried harder, because if I had made it to "Worth", that film shared an actor with tonight's film. However, I need to be able to link both TO and FROM a film, and I'm still not sure it would have been possible, it maybe would have been an entirely different early September line-up if I'd been aiming for that film. No use worrying about that now....
THE PLOT: A young Pakistani man chasing corporate success on Wall Street finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family's homeland.
AFTER: Well, since I've already watched films like "United 93" and "Extremely Loud and Dangerously Close", that leaves me with fewer choices now if I want to mark the occasion. So this is a different sort of film that doesn't deal with the event directly, but it does show some of that fateful day's repercussions. The central character is a Pakistani immigrant who's rising through the ranks at a Wall Street company, one that assesses other countries around the world and tries to determine their future value, suggesting adjustments or improvements to their corporate strategies. That makes him....an assessor? I don't fully understand the job, I guess, but it must be important to businesses somehow.
Changez Khan seems to be living the American Dream, he's up for a promotion and he's got an American artist girlfriend, but after the September 11 attacks, everything seems to change - he's out of the country when it happens, and upon returning to the U.S., he's strip-searched at the airport just because of the way he looks. He also endures racial hatred on the streets and he gets arrested and interrogated with no cause. Yeah, I remember the panic in and around NYC in the weeks that followed, I won't say this didn't happen.
Also, his girlfriend's new art installation is all about him being Pakistani, and she quoted him out of context for her art, and maybe she was trying to be "edgy" by playing upon the whole "fear of the Middle East people" thing, but still, not cool. Then things don't go well on a business trip to Istanbul when he refuses to close down a struggling company, just because the owner gave him a copy of his father's poetry that had been translated into Turkish. Really, he's not supposed to let his personal feelings take precedence over the financial decisions, but I guess we can take this as a sign that he feels he's lost touch with his culture in favor of being American, and right then, all America was giving him was prejudice and hatred.
He quits his job, perhaps hastily, because without that job, his visa expires and he's forced to return to Pakistan, where he gets hired as a university lecturer, the colleges are short-handed because many of the foreign professors have left the country. But his lectures turn into screeds against the U.S. intrusions into the Middle East, and in turn this leads to government authorities searching his home and office, and threatening his family. When an American professor at the same university is kidnapped and held for ransom, it brings events to a head, and soon the CIA sends a journalist to interview Khan, to determine how much he knows about the kidnapping.
Meeting with the journalist in a cafe is really the framing device for the whole film, and Khan tells him his backstory, which we see in flashbacks, until we're all caught up to the present (2012) and I'm honestly not sure if this film is designed to explain how someone can become radicalized, which is one step closer to justifying that, or if it's meant to suggest that the actions of the United States following 9/11 did more harm than good - in trying to protect Americans and keep the country safe by expelling immigrants back to the Middle East, that may have created more Muslims with vendettas against the U.S. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, right?
I guess the bottom line here is that there's always a domino effect, and thus things always end up being more complicated than they seem at first. What I remember thinking shortly after 9/11 was that there was going to be another Gulf War, very soon. But if you remember, Pres. George W. Bush declared war on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, which was not the main perpetrator of 9/11, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda was. The Bush/Cheney administration swore there was a direct link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, but was there? They had Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell showing Congress satellite photos of what just HAD to be weapons of mass destruction, only once we invaded, funny story, those were never found, were they? So, was it smart to start a war, which lasted over 20 years in one form or another, or was there really no justification for doing so? The answer is not simple, not by any means, because we can't say what would have happened if we had NOT gone to war, but I've always thought about it. But, we're a country of action, we wanted to DO something to get somebody back for 9/11, and the harder thing to do would have been to do nothing. I still maintain it might have been the smarter thing to do, though.
(And yeah, I'm cynical in nature - if you show me satellite photos of WMD's, my first thought is, "Oh, really? Is that what those are? Are you sure? Or are those photos faked?" But then, even if the photos were real, I don't know why anybody ever pointed out that those weapons could have been MOVED, I mean, you can put missiles and bombs on trucks and move them around, right? So let's assume for a moment the photos were real, maybe the Iraqis just moved them, only then, umm, where did they GO?)
Also starring Riz Ahmed (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Kate Hudson (last seen in "Something Borrowed"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Kiefer Sutherland (last seen in "The Contractor"), Om Puri (last seen in "The Hundred-Foot Journey"), Shabana Azmi, Meesha Shafi, Martin Donovan (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Adil Hussain (last seen in "Life of Pi"), Imaad Shah, Chandrachur Singh, Ashwath Bhatt, Nelsan Ellis (last seen in "The Stanford Prison Experiment"), Christopher Nicholas Smith (last seen in "Little Children"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "Worth"), Clayton Landey (last seen in "Eraser"), Roy McCrerey (last seen in "Papillon" (2017), Mark Oliver (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Javed Basu-Kesselman, Sonya Jehan, Gary Richardson, Sarah Quinn (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Ali Sethi, Deepti Datt, Rohan Gupta, Claire Roberts Lamont, Vince Canlas (last seen in "Black Adam"), Cody W. Parker, John Darko, Robert Bryan Davis (last seen in "The Highwaymen"), Ashlyn Henson, Christian Wallace
RATING: 5 out of 10 laid-off workers
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