The movie begins in the West Bank, where the routine of life has numbed Muna to herself. She works at a bank about 15 minutes from the home she shares in Bethlehem with her mother. Thanks to the Israeli-policed checkpoints and that hideous concrete barrier, the trip to her office sometimes takes two hours. She still runs into the ex-husband who left her for a younger, thinner woman, though it’s hard to imagine that woman being more beautiful than voluptuous Muna.
She brings her fatigue and frustration to Illinois, but in America she also acquires wonder, ambition, an interest in dieting, and the ability to stand up for herself. All that lands her is the job at a strip-mall White Castle, of which she is so ashamed that she tells her family she works at the adjacent bank. There’s some good comedy in Muna changing out of her blue uniform and into her fine professional clothes to, say, find out why the newly rebellious Fadi is in trouble at school. He’s fighting the kids who taunt him with racism.
The movie flirts with too-muchness: coincidences abound; Fadi’s nastiness toward his mother comes almost out of nowhere; and, obviously, the evocatively named White Castle doubles as the sweet spot for most of the drama. Some of the timing feels opportunistic. Muna and Fadi come west at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq. And there are moments when the family’s home becomes a West Bank metaphor, not least when one of Muna’s spoiled nieces uses tape to create a border down the center of her bedroom to keep her little sister penned in. In the West Bank, Muna and Fadi lacked their own country. In Illinois, they lack their own home.
