Julian Schnabel’s Miral is a fictional (though somewhat fact-based) story set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had high hopes for the picture, since Schnabel’s last feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was one of my favorite movies of the past decade. Miral is, paradoxically, both more modest and more ambitious than Diving Bell: Here, Schnabel doesn’t have to face the challenge of getting inside the mind of a man who’s almost completely sealed off from the world; on the other hand, he’s treading into extremely sticky political territory here, and the story he’s trying to tell — in which the lives of four women intertwine, over a span of some 45 years — is technically more complicated.
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REVIEW: Julian Schnabel Loses His Gift for Subtlety — At Least for Now — in Middle East Drama Miral
