The Infidel
Starring: Omid Djalili, Richard Schiff
Directed by: Josh Appignanesi
Parental advisory: coarse language
Running time: 105 minutes
Rating: Two stars out of five
The joke in The Infidel is that a London cab driver named Mahmud Nasir (rubber-faced British comic Omid Djalili) is going through the papers of his dead mother and discovers that he was born Jewish. Not only that, but his birth name was Solly Shimshillewitz. “Why didn’t they just call you Jewy Jew Jew Jew Jew and be done with it?” asks his neighbour, a transplanted American named Lenny Goldberg and played with much New York angst by The West Wing’s Richard Schiff.
This is bad, because Mahmud’s son is just about to marry the daughter of a radical Egyptian imam called the “hate cleric” in the British press and nicknamed by Mahmud - who is a moderate Muslim, if a forcefully coarse one - as “Fatty Fatwa-Face,” among other things. The engagement means that Mahmud has to pretend to be devout, while at the same time exploring his Jewish roots. Oy vey, what’s he going to do?
Well, learn the meaning of “oy vey,” for one thing, the lessons provided by Lenny, along with a tutorial in matzo ball soup and instruction in dancing like the people in Fiddler on the Roof. They get the “oy” down pat, but the “vey” is beyond them.
The Infidel has some fun with stereotypes, even when it’s underlining them with some dubious images (Mahmud imagining himself in the striped uniform of a concentration camp prisoner). But for all its mugging, it’s an indifferent comedy, a kind of racial slapstick that expresses some outrageous ideas - Mahmud, in his guise as a radical, promotes jokes about big noses and love of money - that are meant to be funny, just because they’re being expressed at all. Transgression can be amusing, but Djalili, for all his roly-poly desperation, is no Sacha Baron Cohen (whose brother Erran provides the music for the film, strangely).
Mahmud spends the film either posing as an anti-Semite and burning his skullcap at a pro-Palestinian rally, for instance, or posing as an actual Semite, telling jokes in what can only be described as pidgin Yiddish and shrugging authentically. It’s a low-key affair - call it One Wedding and a Bar Mitzvah - whose plot relies on several stereotypes of its own (the suspicious wife, the devout son, the forgiving friend).
The story - which, it will not surprise anyone to hear, is eventually about tolerance - gets beyond screenwriter David Baddiel, who turns the climax into an absurd cop-out that dodges all the issues in favour of a deus ex machina, unique only for the fact that the deus is simultaneously Jewish and Muslim. And while director Josh Appignanesi keeps the outrage at a low boil - the movie’s best lines are told in asides - he can’t find much depth in a story in which a Muslim man, confronted with the excesses of a jihadist cleric, says, “How meshuggah can he be?” Oy vey, indeed.
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CAPSULE REVIEW - The Infidel: A small British comedy - call it One Wedding and a Bar Mitzvah - about a Muslim man who discovers he’s actually adopted and Jewish. That means learning about his Semitic roots while posing as an anti- Semite for the sake of a visiting radical cleric. The resulting parade of stereotypes isn’t very funny. Rating: Two stars out of five - Jay Stone