When an American film opens with two attractive  people in an American style house canoodling in Urdu you suspect you’ve got something out of the ordinary before your eyes.  When, within 5 minutes, it’s got you by the throat, you know. Then, frame by frame, as a transplanted Pakistani couple and a divorced native born American woman, find out secrets about their sons, we get a mystery, an exploration of stereotypes, an essay on trust and loss of belief.  Torn is a very good movie with a few false steps, and a softly abrupt ending  that we wish had taken more time and detail to unfold.

Maryam [Mahnoor Baloch ] and Ali [Faran Tahir] are solidly in the American middle class after being here for some seventeen years — he a partner in a Pakistani restaurant in Oakland, California and she with a small real estate business.  As the film opens the news is reporting a massive explosion at the food court of an East Bay mall.  A message on their answering machine from their son tells them he was going there for the afternoon. All the signs of urban chaos greet them as they arrive: flashing emergency vehicle lights, do-not-cross tapes, kleig lights, camera crews, frantic people — whom they soon join.  Maryam encounters another distraught mother [Dendrie Taylor as Lea] being turned away by a gruff cop.

The local detective, Kalkowitz, [John Heard] is joined by a somewhat miscast  FBI agent Reese [Sharon Washington] and it soon turns out that a bomb of some sort had set off the larger gas explosion.  The two sons are suspects. The investigation turns up details of the boys’ lives that neither mother knew about, dredging up doubt out of their initial certainty of their sons’ innocence and anger at the accusations.  Baloch is an accomplished actress in Pakistan, here in her first American release.  She is very good, the picture of strength and bewilderment.  Tahir is also of Pakistani background with many TV and film credits in the US.  He is excellent as a loving husband who finds himself with more anger than she at the racial-religious presumptions being made about them.  The tension between them is nicely calibrated, particularly around a visit to the local mosque.  

Taylor is quite wonderful as an almost unhinged tough-girl, left alone to raise her son when her husband found Jesus and their marriage dissolved.  His re-entry into her life is by turns awkward, believable and needing a few more takes to get it right.

Interestingly, Heard, as the detective, is one of the few who offer words of support to the couple as anti-Muslim attacks surface in the newspapers and graffiti on the house.  It’s a nice touch.

The movie is ambitious.  Terrorism, ethnic-religious fear, marital tensions are big topics to tackle.  Jeremiah Birnbaum,  does a good job in his first solo outing as a director though he lets a few cliches slip by — when Marya turns away in bed after Ali speaks wistfully of having another child, or when Lea finally takes her son’s ashes to the ocean and the camera lingers on her hand as it touches the box while driving, are a couple of them. Don’t point to the obvious so obviously.  Indirection works.  And unexpected gesture will help us see without feeling a hand turning our eyes: see?  The scenes of the couple’s love and recognition of what is happening are superb.  Maryam’s anger at the FBI inquisition, believable and true.   The screenplay, by Michael Richter, apparently his first, [with credit also to Birnbaum and Marc Posner for the story] is by and large, compelling, the characters convincing and the setting and context in today’s America spot on.

It does for me what I often look for in fiction and film, raising fundamental questions of choice and behavior.  How do people respond when the slope they are standing on gets slippery?  What do they do —what would I do as them, or as a neighbor–  when the fear and accusations start flooding?  When a brick goes in their window, when hate is sprayed on their walls, what would I, as a neighbor do?  Which of many ways of responding do the writer and directors choose?  It engages us in a reality we all recognize.

The movie is only an hour and twenty minutes long.  Another 10 at least would have served them well — but only after figuring out how to properly end it.  One of the thematic points of the movie is that all that remains is doubt.  Who were the boys?  Did either of them plant a bomb? How did they, the mothers, both close to their sons, not know beforehand what they discover?  But the movie doesn’t build to this.  It leaves the women wondering, shamed somewhat by their own false conclusion,  and then gives the audience important evidence the mothers don’t have — as if to let us off the hook of wondering they are still impaled on.

Another minute or two also to see what happens to Lea after she is nearly fired as a cleaning woman, her work impacted by the stress of her son’s death, her husband’s reappearance, fear that her son was killed by others or that he was the killer.  Somehow, after the shout down at work, the matter is dropped.  It shouldn’t have been.

But by all means see it.  Scenes in the East Bay hills and a Fremont mall.  Good story, well conceived. Very good acting and much promise for director and writers.  Rotten Tomatoes likes it. 

And for more try here.

And don’t delay. Small gems get lost mighty fast.