By Patricia Ducey. Miral, the latest from painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel, strives to marry lyricism to polemic; the clumsy union fails.Written by Schnabel’s collaborator and now girlfriend Rula Jebreal from her “fictionalized autobiography,” the resulting, uneven film has been soundly rejected by both critics and audiences alike. Schnabel’s prior efforts–The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Before Night Falls, and Basquiat–chose real artists as their subjects and these unique stories, told with his exquisite painterly vision, proved eminently watchable and thoroughly satisfying as stories. Schnabel knows the territory of artist versus society, artist versus himself, and of the ecstatic vision that can sometimes destroy–he inhabits this milieu himself. He fancies himself a bit of an artistic rebel as well, clad always in his silk pajamas, carrying on his serial marriages in the NY gossip columns, all with a carefully calibrated dash of épater la bourgeoisie. Why then veer away from this successful, tragic-Romantic vein and choose the highly politicized Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead?
It would be too easy to suggest that Schnabel’s love affair with the beauteous Jebreal that began with their collaboration entirely influenced his adaptation. Instead, I attribute this filmic failure to a common psychological characteristic of the left: a veneration of victimhood that surpasses real understanding or compassion.
The Germans call it Leidensneid, or an “envy of suffering.” Based on exaggerated idealism, those who have not suffered much at all feel somewhat guilty for their good fortune (as if freedom and prosperity were mere happy accidents) and almost inexplicably offer support to ideals that they would never countenance in their own life. Communism, radical Islam, fascism; all have been momentary darlings of the left. This envy of suffering propelled the German and Italian activists/terrorists of the ‘60s to identify with the Vietnamese or the PLO against the West, for instance, and culminated in Entebbe – with the end always justifying the means, however murderous. In the leftist moral universe, the losing side is always right. Thus in Miral, if Israelis are prosperous and free thinking, the poverty stricken and devout Palestinians must be their victims. Continue reading LFM Review: Miral, and the Envy of Suffering