Sorry, Haters

Here's a film I knew very little, if anything, about going in, found utterly compelling in the beginning, thoroughly intriguing in the middle and completely frustrated at the end as the story veered off so wildly in the third act.

That's not to say "Sorry, Haters" isn't a fascinating movie to see.

The main reason to see this is Robin Wright Penn's mesmerizing performance as a woman - Phoebe - who just keeps twisting and turning our expectations of who she is. Watching Phoebe come undone while Penn keeps her completely rational makes the character that more frightening.

Abdel Kechiche - as Ashade, a Syrian chemist working as a New York cab driver and trying to get his brother out of Gitmo - is so believable in the role. You don't doubt his anger and frustration at what's going on and you can understand why he he is who he is.

Writer-director Jeff Stanzler provides an interesting landscape of post-9/11 America. He also provides one of the scariest rationalizations a character can provide for that horrible day.

Stanzler doesn't let us get all that comfortable with the story and throws in a doozy of a twist in the middle. We never see it coming and it just makes the film that much stronger and powerful.

But then comes the denouement.

It's almost as if Stanzler just had no idea how to end his film given the circumstances in which he had placed his two leading characters. So he devises this rather ludicrous change that takes the story completely off-kilter. He just keeps going and you can sense the story going off-track. But Stanzler doesn't seem to mind and, ultimately, the film veers off course and winds up with an utterly preposterous and unconvincing finale. I was never looking for something happy; I just wanted something that I could believe.

With semi-well known actors giving powerful performances, this was a surprisingly good movie. Kechiche and Penn touch each others lives in ways no one should. Penn plays a vulnerable woman whose life has taken some horrible turns as she enlists the aid of the Muslim cabbie Kechiche to be her friend while she offers him legal help for his family. As events unfold, Kechiche realizes that everything is not as it seems, and has to make some critical life decisions in an attempt to get things back on track. Penn plays the role with absolute precision, giving you the chills the character masterfully manipulates the other characters, especially Kechiche, as you watch events unfold in disbelief.

In New York, the Muslin taxi driver Ashade (Abdellatif Kechiche) drives a woman (Robin Wright Penn) to New Jersey and back and witness she scratching a car with a stone. She tells that her name is Philly and she is the powerful producer of the show "Sorry, Haters", and the owner of the car is the woman that "stole" her husband and daughter. Philly snoops in Ashade's life and he tells that he has doctorate in chemistry in Syria but is supporting his sister-in-law Eloise (Élodie Bouchez) and his nephew working as taxi driver since his brother, who is also a Canadian citizen, was arrested in JFK while in transit and deported back to Syria. Philly promises to help the family using a lawyer that is a friend of her. However, sooner his and Eloise's lives and hope are affected by the actions of Philly, whose name is indeed Phoebe.

"Sorry, Haters" is an impressive and disturbing movie about the prejudice and lack of respect with immigrants (and tourists) in the United States of America after the tragic September 11th by a minority of the American citizens and authorities. The treatment spent to Ashade by the security guard and the policewoman in the very beginning discloses the prejudice and indifference to the Muslin taxi driver. Robin Wright Penn has a top-notch performance in the role of an insane masochistic schizophrenic sociopath lonely woman and her complex character deserves to be studied by psychologists. The destructive behavior of the authorities based on an anonymous denounce, treating the innocent Eloise without the minimum respect, is very sad. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Esperança e Preconceito" ("Hope and Prejudice")

This acting in this film was excellent, and I found it very powerful and gripping with a very unexpected ending. It is too bad that smaller films like this, that are thought provoking and leave you thinking well after seeing it, often get overlooked.

As disturbing as Robin Wright Penn's character is, you can't take your eyes off of her and wonder what she is capable of next. And Abdel is also very captivating. The emotional twists, the way these two psychologically torture each other consistently leaves an element of surprise. Some may love it, some may hate it, but with these two controversial characters, I would be hard pressed to hear anyone leave this saying they were bored.

The one thing that is sad, is that indie films like this that are not getting the media attention deserved, means that Robin won't even get an Oscar nod, cuz she acted her ass off! Props to the writer/director Stanzler for taking a brave chance on this material.

This is one very riveting psychological drama that just continues to evolve it's statement of purpose throughout the well plotted piece. Working on a tiny budget, this film was shot on less expensive equipment in merely 15 days, but the movie still manages to be about as relevant and fresh as is possible in a post 9/11 context. The hopefully soon-to-be-known Jeff Stanzler weaves into his tiny project about a mysterious, bitter divorcée and a humble Arabic cab driver, the psychological micro and macro-cosmos revolving around the current political climate viewed through an emotionally unstable context. Truly tough to describe the profound themes examined and revealed in this movie without taking away from the wonderful grace which with those plot devices are announced, but we can definitely assume that the two lead performers do an extraordinary job at keeping the material grounded and relative, however irrational the final result may be- it is nonetheless strikingly potent, and an all too rare refresher into the darkness and secrets one mind may be able to harbor while always looking the other way in front of a population.