Film of the Week: Amreeka

It is like most immigrant sitcoms, but then it isn't.
Cherien Dabis' feature debut is often persuasive about the wacky and sometimes soul-withering culture shock a Palestinian single mom and her adolescent son experience upon moving to a small town near Chicago. That's clearly because Dabis drew on her own background as the child of Arab expatriates in Ohio.
Sure, there's prejudice and fear, but Muna (Nisreen Faour) is indomitably optimistic about everything from assuming her equal status with all - something she definitely didn't enjoy back in the occupied West Bank - to the effectiveness of her marvelous American weight-loss treatment. The character could have used another shade or two of depression, but Faour keeps her realistic enough, and she earns our respect rather than just our sympathy.
"Amreeka" derives even more strength from the characters around Muna; her increasingly trouble-prone boy Fadi (Melkar Muallem) and the in-laws who take the new arrivals in. Few films have woven the problems faced by a suspected ethnic minority as seamlessly as this does with universal conflicts both generational and conjugal.
Though it hardly operates on the shocking, hilarious and insightfully multifaceted scale of last year's brilliant "Towelhead," "Amreeka" is at least as smart as it is sweet, and tough and dirty when it needs to be. You may even come to love it, and won't have to feel like a sap for doing so.