Chabert Watch! Fatwa (2006)

love the US flag pine tree deodorizer.  Feels very 00's

Watched:  04/23/2025

Format:  Midnight Pulp

Viewing:  First

Director:  John R. Carter

An absolutely bizarre movie that sees the intersection of 

• the 1990's and 00's-era post Pulp Fiction crime flicks
• the success of shows like 24
• the belief that shooting on consumer video will lend an immediacy to the film (this is not correct)
• a first time director
• established actors
• unyielding pretentiousness

all in one neat package that winds up as one of those 90 minute movies that seems like it's been at least two hours, and so you check, and it's got another 30 minutes to go...  It's also one of those movies where everything seems very disconnected and then wants to make everything tie together in the last 20 minutes or so, but when put together, just starts stretching credulity way past the breaking point.

Fatwa (2006) is a post 9/11,  post fall of Iraq indie thriller// political commentary.  It follows a desperate would-be terrorist in DC who is planning *something* - it's hinted at early on he's going to make a nuclear device using household objects.  He's specifically targeting a US Senator played by Lauren Holly.  (Holly is also an Executive Producer, but I assume that was her negotiating and more of a ceremonial role.)

Movies about what was actually happening at the time were like catnip to some moviemakers, but it was nuts watching people try to make movies about stuff that just happened or was still happening.  Not distasteful, so much as "but maybe I don't need a movie to tell me about this, because I'm looking at it every time I flip on CNN".

Fatwa opens with a definition of "fatwa" over news footage familiar to those of us who recall the heyday of post-9/11 America (hey, remember when the news was well produced and watchable and watching CNN seemed reasonable?), and serves as a reminder in 2025 of what we were all experiencing at the time.  

But in 2006, this had to have felt intensely heavy-handed, as it's all the most familiar scenes, like a Now That's What I Call The Iraq Invasion! collection.

By the way, the movie, much like America in this era, doesn't really want to make a difference between the Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein while referencing both.  

Lauren Holly's Senator is married and has a young-adult daughter, who is a movie-approved reckless-rich-kid-of-a-powerful-person who is happily doing drugs and having fun out of the line of sight of her conservative parents.  The daughter is being led astray by Lacey Chabert, who is playing an Israeli who skipped to the US and, in the wake of her sister's death at the hands of the PLO, is ignoring her required service to hang out and do lines of blow in Washington DC.  

That Chabert shooting lines has not been screen-capped and meme'd for Hallmark movie season is mind-boggling.  

Holly is also deeply aerobicized, and having an affair with a dude with a lot of hair gel (Billy Warlock), who is not her husband she seems to despise (character actor John Doman). The husband's brother is a wacky enforcer/ hit-man (Angus Macfayden) who is partnered with Mykelti Williamson.  

I know.  It's nuts.  You would recognize or know so many people in this movie.  And it looks like it was shot on Hi-8.  Or else the poor quality is because the version I watched was a rip from a video tape or something.

Suffice to say, the broken marriage, the criminal brother, the terrorist and his secret spy supporting our terrorist (Noa Tishby), all are interconnected.  Because poetry or making a point or something.  But that the entire plot hinges on a rich Senator's daughter having a coke hook-up who is a 40 year old Middle Eastern cabby seems dubious and that's required for the plot to work feels like the thinnest of ideas.

The movie wants to work in some philosophy, but puts it in the mouths of the oddest characters in the oddest of circumstances.  A coked-up Chabert let's slip her position on religion as the cause of all war, Mykelti Williamson ponders why Americans can never understand the orthodox religions of the Middle East while getting a big-ass American burger.  

And I'm not sure the movie knows how it's stance on Israel could be interpreted, as our representative in this movie is Chabert's agnostic coke fiend.  I expect the writer meant something more universal, but...  felt a bit tone-deaf.

It also is book-ended by passages read aloud in a college classroom.  I won't get into what they are, but once you're pausing your own movie to read to the audience to make your points, we may have goofed a bit.

The thing is - I think there was probably something here in the film if you kept reworking the script.  Explain why they needed to dispose of the one body the way they were going to. Stuff like that which goes nowhere. The ideas Fatwa wants to convey about the deadlock the US has entered into in the Middle East and that we're so removed from it back home is not novel as news or entertainment, but it is worth repeating from time-to-time.  Because the actors are pros, it's weirdly better than it should be while being frustrating to watch, because of the lofi production, the coincidences and interlocking elements in the script that just never feel earned.

But as with so many cheaper films, I want to know more about what the heck was happening here.  How DID we get these actors?  What did they think they were making?  What was the time between production and release?  How did they convince Lauren Holly to strip down to her skivvies for this?  And get both of the young female stars into swimsuits for no reason (who are clearly supposed to be in a relationship, but for some reason the movie shies away from flatly saying so.  Now you get shy, movie?).

After Christian Mingle The Movie, I guess my rage-meter is all off-kilter.  This movie is pretty much DOA, and maybe dopey and preachy and too many other things. But I was not mad at it.  I suspect the budget was so low, they shot some of it guerrilla-style.  And in that, it's weird and wild.  And I don't know where you draw the lines on this movie and ask

Is it Stupid?

That's, to some degree, not just about the movie, but unpacking world history.  And certainly in 2006, So - on one level, bringing the events of post 9/11 and how they impacted the globe back to the US and the elite is maybe clever?  But I'm not sure this movie and how it goes about it's goals of showing how we're all intertwined exactly works.  (SPOILERS:  having our terrorist just shout at Lauren Holly she was somehow personally responsible for the death of his son without anything specific makes what we just watched for 90 minutes fail to add up).

By the way, the plot listed on Wikipedia is not accurate.  They are never at the Mall of the Americas or Minnesota. This takes place in NYC and DC.

But there's just too much in the movie - it's every idea the writer and director ever had crammed into one 90 minute package, but delivered flat and oddly dull.

Chabert, for her part, is pretty good!  Career-wise, at this point, she's mostly doing voice work for cartoons, with her last big thing being the Christopher Reeve-directed The Brooke Ellison Story a full two years prior.  She also was the love interest of some kind in a post-American Pie raunchy teen comedy.  So I am beginning to gather that a post Mean Girls world for Chabert got pretty weird.  But 2006 is also when her career started warming up a bit again.  But this is kind of her anti-Hallmark phase.  She's doing indie films and trying things on, as one does when they're in their 20's.  There are movies on her imdb I can't find that I deeply wish I could (Being Michael Madsen being one).  I kind of wonder what she was doing on the young Hollywood scene at the time.

Also worth noting, Chabert and Holly would re-join forces in Hot Frosty in 2024.