For My Father

The Israeli feature For My Father is a rarity indeed: A sweet, sentimental movie about a suicide bomber.

The movie takes a completely apolitical look at the lives of its three main characters, focusing not on their differences but on how, in a way, they are trapped by their cultures.

While films like “The Band's Visit,” “Jellyfish,” and “Waltz With Bashir” suggest a subtler, more psychologically directed path for Israeli film, Dror Zahavi's For My Father is old-school social melodrama (plus bombs), all the way.

Well-intentioned but philosophically timid, For My Father wants to meditate on the moral reshuffling that can accompany imminent death. But the director, Dror Zahavi, is ill served by a screenplay (by Ido Dror and Jonatan Dror) too attracted to coincidence and too repelled by the existential brink.

Israeli helmer Dror Sahavi's well-meaning but simplistic terrorist melodrama, gingerly counterbalancing religious fanatics on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, utilizes a lyrical "Romeo and Juliet"-type encounter between a reluctant suicide bomber and a Jewish escapee from Orthodox closed-mindedness to plead mutual tolerance.

Too on-the-nose to resonate past the end credits, this slickly produced film still deserves praise for being progressive-minded, as Tarek isn’t a hateful man but a product of his circumstances who is only trying to help his family. It’s frustrating to see such a humane movie suffer from oversimplification.