Good news, Denverites! The new Denver Film Center at Colfax (next to Tattered Cover and Twist and Shout) is keeping Four Lions in rotation for at least another week. That means you have 10 days to go see it! So do it!
If you can stomach a slapstick comedy about wacky suicide bombers, Four Lions is pretty much a perfect setup. It’s chocked full of just about the most timely and compelling food for thought around, which will keep your attention for the 2 seconds of the movie that you’re not about to cough up a lung from laughing so hard. Think along the lines of your typical Christopher Guest mocumentary vibe, except that instead of amateur actors or dog show freaks, Four Lions follows a group of radical Jihadists in London who want nothing more than to martyr themselves while blowing up as many Western consumerist infidels as possible. I know, right?
To give away too much about Four Lions, its jokes, its plot, and its characters would be a slight. Suffice to say, a trip to a Taliban training camp in Pakistan, the hardships of covertly stockpiling high explosives, and finally a terrorist attack on the London Marathon all provide ample opportunity for our “heroes” to hilariously bungle any chance of making it to Paradise. Standard conventions of narrative movie watching would encourage us to identify with the goals of our protagonists. On the other hand, as Western viewers we find those goals abhorrent. Director Chris Morris deftly toys with viewer perception, knowingly throwing us off our guard.
Chris Morris doesn’t hit the audience over the head with an overt message, rather allowing his boneheaded characters dig their own proverbial and literal graves. One satire comes through loud and clear: These guys are not particularly good Muslims. They deride westerners for rampant consumerism, and then in the same breath one of the would be martyrs complains about a guy who owes him money. They don’t frequent a mosque or interact with other Muslims. In one hilarious but very uncomfortable scene, terrorist cell leader Omar (Riz Ahmed) is visited by his brother, a peaceful, practicing Muslim, who encourages him to stop pursuing martyrdom and rejoin the church. Omar’s brother refuses to enter the front room while Omar’s wife is in the room. Omar and his wife laugh, mocking his brother’s observance of Islamic tradition. Oppression of women is the least reconcilable thing about Islam for many westerners, and it’s a cross-eyed marry-go-round of satire when the suicide bomber defends his wife’s freedom against the moderate Muslim.
I commend Tim League’s newly minted Drafthouse Films for spearheading Four Lion’s North American distribution, but it’s unfortunate that this movie is getting such a small release. It just drives home how cynical, frightened, hopeless, and humorless the United States has become in the last decade. We are truly terrorized, and the worst part is that by and large we embrace it. I have to give credit to Denver Film Society Programmer extraordinaire Keith Garcia for pointing out that Four Lions shares a lot of similarities with Ernest Lubitch’s 1940 Hitler spoof To Be or Not To Be. That comparison got my wheels turning. When Hitler, who is pretty much synonymous with pure evil, flexed his muscle, England and the U.S. responded with movies like To Be or Not To Be and The Great Dictator. Even more serious fare like Powell and Pressburger’s incomparable 49th Parallel laughs in the face of the enemy: “Put up your dukes, Nazi.” But when we’re terrorized by suicide bombers we react like frightened rabbits. We’ve made terrorism and even more generally the strained relationship between contemporary Islam and the Western world taboo. I want to be blown to bits by an anonymous stranger about as little as the next guy, but that’s a moot point. Why are we such sticks in the mud about terrorism? That’s not our national character. That’s not our heritage. Four Lions is a not-so-gentle reminder, and as such, it will probably go unnoticed.
Magic Moment: That’s easy. Puffin Party.
-Ben