“War Within’ Finds Suspense in Roots of Terrorism”
Grabbed from a Paris street by American commandos in a black SUV, a Pakistani engineering student is drugged and flown to a Karachi prison.
Three years later, he hides in a shipping container aboard a New York-bound freighter. Radicalized by the torture inflicted by his interrogators, Hassan (Ayad Akhtar) is now a suicide bomber aiming at Grand Central Station.
In highly topical “The War Within” director and co-writer Joseph Castelo dispenses with the ticking suspense of Alfred Hitchcok’s “Sabotage” (1936), where a saboteur’s bomb rips a London bus, and Edward Zwick’s “The Siege” (1998), where U.S. agents hunt Islamic terrorists in New York City. Instead the action plays across the quietly expressive face of Hassan. The internal conflict cited in the title unfolds under the roof of the Jersey City home of his childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), where Hassan instills tenets of jihad in Sayeed’s young son and recalls his youthful love for Sayeed’s ravishing sister Duri (Nandana Sen).
Hassan brings news that his brother was shot in Lahore while protesting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That’s why Hassan was picked up as a suspect. Hassan’s innocent lifelong link to Sayeed will make this Pakistani-American a suspect, too. “It’s a beautiful country,” Sayeed tells Hassan upon arrival. “Nice people.” His opinion — or his son’s — may change after FBI agents pull this moderate from his home in the interests of Homeland Security. “The War Within” shows how counterterrorist tactics can backfire and create more terrorists.
The keen-eyed handheld camerawork by Lisa Rinzler matches the script for insight. A profile shot of Hassan driving a taxi catches an airliner landing in the distance beyond his window. Just as artful is her lighting at the Saints & Sinners strip club. Cell member Khalid (Charles Daniel Sandoval) picks this infidels’ venue to rendezvous with Hassan: “It’s to taste the freedom that will destroy them.” Two lurid colors split the fundamentalists from the fleshpots.
Never sensational and always thoughtful, this smart drama is ripped from the op-ed page, not the jumbo-font headlines. It’s released by the producers of such political documentaries “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Control Room,” and dramas “The Assassination of Richard Nixon,” “Series 7″ and “The Guys.”
In his press notes, which include a bibliography of studies on the film’s issues, Castelo states: “I understand the reluctance to extend sympathy to those who wish to do us harm. But I am a firm believer in the necessity and the power of empathy.”
“The War Within” illuminates the current war on terror from more angles than our one-sided action thrillers.
— Bill Stamets