A culture clash writ small, messy, and real

June 20, 2008|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

"Operation Filmmaker," the sad, funny, obsessively watchable/avert-your-eyes documentary opening today, doesn't just illustrate the truth of the saying "No good deed goes unpunished." It spreads the punishment around, from the executive suites of Hollywood to the mean streets of Baghdad. Everyone here comes out smelling bad - that's why the film's so good.

In 2004, a year after the US invasion of Iraq, actor Liev Schreiber saw an MTV segment about a Baghdad film student named Muthana Mohmed, whose studies had literally been bombed out from under him. Schreiber was heading to the Czech Republic to make his film-directing debut, an adaptation of the novel "Everything Is Illuminated" starring Elijah Wood, and he convinced his producer Peter Saraf to hire Mohmed as an intern for the duration of the shoot. In addition, an independent documentary team headed by filmmaker Nina Davenport followed the young Iraqi around, hoping for a story to emerge.

One did, but not the one Davenport expected. Mohmed turns out to be sweet, articulate, and remarkably unmotivated. Expecting to land in A-list heaven, he's frustrated to find himself in production assistant hell, driving vans and mixing vegan snacks for the producer. ("What is this 'tofu'?" he wonders.) The gulf between the Americans' expectations of the intern (be properly thankful, show initiative, claw your way up) and Mohmed's own (weren't you going to show me how to be a filmmaker?) widens until everyone has achieved the proper state of passive-aggressive hostility. It doesn't help that Muthana really likes President Bush, a sin akin to child molestation to the Los Angelenos.

Then "Operation Filmmaker" gets interesting. The "Illuminated" shoot having wrapped and his Czech visa about to expire, Muthana desperately casts about for a way to keep from returning to a collapsing Iraq. This extends to shaking down his new Hollywood friends - including Davenport and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - for favors and hard cash. For their part, they're torn between guilt and a nagging sense they're being hustled.

So which is it? Is Muthana a shameless opportunist or is he being exploited by naive, entitled Americans? Davenport is a smart enough filmmaker to realize that both readings (and neither) are true, and she's honest enough to implicate herself in the devil's bargain. As Mohmed moves to London for film school, hoping to hopscotch from there to New York, he and the director argue with increasing bitterness over what he needs and what she owes.