Amira & Sam

Amira & Sam

The film “Amira & Sam” is about an unlikely love affair between an American soldier who served in Iraq and an undocumented immigrant from that country. What’s worth noting is that writer-director Sean Mullin never drops the quotation marks around the “unlikely” part of their romance. Eventually, there’s nothing strange or conflicted about the connection. It develops at its own pace just as it should. This is merely a story of two individuals coming to know each other and finding common ground.

There are hitches in its path, of course. When Sam (Martin Starr) first meets Amira (Dina Shihabi), things don’t go smoothly at all. He’s visiting her uncle Bassam (Laith Nakli), who worked as a translator for his unit in Iraq and whom Sam saved during an ambush. Amira’s brother was killed in another attack during which he got caught in crossfire, so when Sam walks through the door, she sees him as just another American soldier who as far as she’s concerned is every bit as responsible for her sibling’s death as the troops who were there that day.

That’s quite a gap to bridge, but Mullin views personal connections as ineffable emotions that can transcend politics and history. Bassam tells Amira how Sam saved his life, came back to see him a whole year later out of sheer determination to keep his promise and handed him the star from a burned American flag that he had tried to rescue during the firefight. Whatever preconceptions she had start going away about this man, anyway once she realizes he doesn’t represent U.S. foreign policy or those soldiers who failed her brother by not being able to shield him from harm. He’s just a good guy.

Amira has more inner work to do than Sam does if this relationship stands any chance of working out, although you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from reading Mullin’s screenplay, which is far more interested in the latter character. It’s not that Sam lacks for obstacles. It’s just that they’re all external and, honestly, a little too conveniently laid in his path.

They begin innocently enough. After locking a pack of belligerent, drunken residents in an elevator, Sam gets fired from his security gig at an apartment building. His cousin Charlie (Paul Wesley), a hedge-fund manager who helped him get the job there, presents Sam with an opportunity to win over a potential investor Jack (David Rasche), a Vietnam vet who’s wheelchair-bound after taking shrapnel during the war by promising him a hefty commission if this multimillion-dollar deal goes through for them. The story is set during the summer of 2008, just months before everything went south financially; with such loaded timing, it should come as no surprise that there’s some corruption swirling around this subplot.

During Sam and Amira’s romance everything that Mullin tries to avoid is present in these scenes the heavy handed political statements (Jack decries the “cesspool of self-interest” that is the American economic system), the characters transparently being used to represent concepts instead of being allowed to exist as people in their own right (Charlie says he’s just a “prisoner” of free-market capitalism), an overall feeling that Mullin wants to say something Important.

The romance itself feels like it should be ripe for doing something similar. After all, she gets arrested for selling bootleg DVDs and runs from a cop which leads her into hiding so as not to be deported after going into hiding due to being afraid of getting arrested for misidentifying herself while trying to get away with fraudulently claiming she’s an American citizen. What could or might Mullin want to say about this issue politically is left off the table. It’s just a plot point. If we want to connect the movie and a critique of immigration policy, that is entirely on us.

Their story is better without sweeping political declarations. It’s uncomfortable but tender like any love story worth telling. The two characters talk as though there isn’t a storm cloud hanging over their heads waiting for them outside Sam’s door, where they both stubbornly want to sleep on the floor but wind up sharing his bed instead. It’s pillow talk minus sex, when they laugh and share some secret information about themselves they test out jokes on each other (Sam wants to be a stand-up comedian) and test out touching each other (Amira tells him she likes punching people who deserve it). Then one licks the other’s cheek.

Almost all of their relationship feels as unencumbered with petty conflict as those characters are in this scene. The only time Mullin makes any obvious attempt at addressing social or ethnic differences between them comes during a later scene set at Charlie’s engagement party, where the characters encounter a barrage of casual and overt bigotry. A random woman asks Amira, referring to her hijab, “Do they make you wear that thing?” One of Charlie’s co-workers (Ross Marquand) thinks she looks like Aladdin’s girlfriend. Sam’s uncle (Mark Elliot Wilson) goes on a rant linking all Arabs to 9/11. Of course, this part of their relationship sadly needs to be addressed but it comes so late and hits so hard that it feels shoehorned.

There’s just enough of that feeling throughout the movie to undercut the more organic parts of the love story. Nowhere is this truer than in the subplot involving Sam’s professional ties with Charlie, which occupies so much screen time that Amira winds up feeling like an afterthought for most of it. “Amira & Sam” is an earnest and gentle examination of two people falling in love when its titular couple are together, but when handling these characters separately the film lacks conviction.

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