OVP: The Insult (2017)

Film: The Insult (2017)
Stars: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Rita Hayek, Camille Salameh, Diamond Bou Abboud
Director: Ziad Doueiri
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Lebanon)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

One of the things that Donald Trump has taken away from me when it comes to the movies is that frequently I find the phrase "that would never happen in real life" to always have an asterisk next to it.  We live in a world now where people get outraged and upset over literally everything (new plan for myself-don't go on Twitter that often, because you're starting to fall into this pattern).  And frequently when you see a turn-of-events in a movie, you get that sense that they are taking it to the worst possible conclusion, even if it means that they are sacrificing realism in the process.  Trump, of course, was in fact the worst possible scenario, and the world that he celebrates, of intolerance, bigotry, and assumption is at the heart of The Insult.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Insult is the rare Oscar-nominated foreign language film that feels universal in its message even though it's clearly addressing a problem specific to Lebanon.  This is unusual for Oscar in this category, where the films that they do nominate either have problems that directly (and narcissistically) involve the United States (I cannot begin to tell you how many World War II dramas have been cited by the Oscars through the years), or they are very specifically showing the world of the country they are from.  Here, though, we see both a modern-day Lebanon (in many ways it feels like Asghar Farhadi's look at domesticity), as well as a universal tale of bigotry and hatred, with a Christian Lebanese man named Tony (Karam) sues a Palestinian refugee Yassar (El Basha) after Yassar a seemingly minor altercation between the two men escalates.

The film's politics aren't always easy to digest, but they are smart enough to give us a few crib notes on why these two men are fighting (relating back to the complicated relationship between Israel, Palestine, and the rest of the Middle East).  Political films from other countries are occasionally difficult to follow as you aren't sure where an animosity comes from (other countries may struggle to understand, why, exactly, our country is so obsessed with abortion but not birth control, if you want an American comparison), but The Insult doesn't suffer from this hiccup.  Instead, it gives us a solid foundation, and then runs amok with it, making these two men stand in for a proxy political fight between two different sides that seems prone to a Civil War.  Honestly, in a pre-Trump era I probably would have let my American ignorance get the better of me here, thinking that this was a suspension of reality too far, but honestly-America is regularly set ablaze by the smallest of indiscretions (look at how everyone threw Meryl Streep under the bus for the Harvey Weinstein harassment...even though there's literally no proof she knew anything about it and she denounced him afterwards!).  There's a lot of changed reality and timeliness to The Insult, and the way that small incidents can escalate quickly.

I just wish the movie was any good.  The film itself is played too cookie-cutter, with a script that's lazy and frequently feels like it's indulgent.  The scene where we figure out the counselors on each side are in fact father-and-daughter is pathetic as a record-scratch, to the point where I almost laughed out of pity for the person who thought this was a good idea, and the inevitable overtures between the two wronged parties feel too easy and too hackneyed.  Farhadi would never have given us characters with such little nuance, and while the screenwriters are clearly observant to public culture, they are not good storytellers.  This would have made a great think piece, but as a movie, the film itself falls flat.