The Infidel(2010)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

As time passes, Mahmud/Solomon “Solly” Shimshillewitz (Omid Djalili) learns whatever he can about Jewish people and Judaism from his American Jewish neighbor, Lenny (Richard Schiff), and he even goes to a bar mitzvah with Lenny and winds up telling a crude joke in broken Yiddish that makes all of the attendees laugh. However, he struggles to keep his Jewish origins and explorations a secret from his wife Saamiya (Archie Panjabi), his daughter Nabi (Leah Fatania), and especially his son Rashid (Amit Shah) because Rashid wishes to wed his girlfriend, Uzma (Soraya Radford), but needs the blessing of her stepfather, Arshad al-Masri (Igal Naor), a fiercely devout Muslim cleric with suspected ties to extreme Islamist groups.

Before attending the aforementioned bar mitzvah, Mahmud goes to a Free Palestine rally with Rashid that Arshad is supposed to make an appearance at (though he ends up getting banned at the last minute by the protest’s organizers), and when Mahmud finds it to be quite hot out, he decides to removes his cap. However, he has forgotten that he is wearing the kippah that Lenny gave him underneath it, and when Rashid and a few other protestors take notice of this, Mahmud – out of desperation – claims that he brought it here to burn it in front of everyone. He then proceeds to do just that, and Arshad’s right-hand men, Tariq (Stewart Scudamore) and Hazeem (Ricky Sekhon), show up and record the incident on their video camera.

Upon their return home from the bar mitzvah, Lenny asks Mahmud why he has been exploring Judaism lately, and Mahmud explains that he found out that his birth father, Isaac “Izzy” Shimshillewitz (whom Lenny knows about because he used to live in their neighborhood years ago, which he randomly mentioned to Mahmud during an argument they had shortly after Mahmud first learned of Izzy’s name), is alive but deathly ill and residing in a Jewish care home, but the rabbi at the home (Matt Lucas) won’t let him see him until he “learns what it means to be a Jew.” Lenny asks him when he plans to see him next, and after Mahmud replies that he intends to go back to the care home tomorrow, Lenny tells him that he will go with him to try to convince the rabbi to let him into Izzy’s room. When they go to the care home, they meet up with the rabbi outside of Izzy’s room, and Mahmud tells him that Lenny has been teaching him about Judaism. However, he ends up getting denied the right to see Izzy again when he cannot recite the Sh’ma or name the Five Books of Moses in Hebrew, and the rabbi tells him to come back when he finds a better teacher than Lenny. When an impatient Mahmud tells the rabbi that he hasn’t told his wife and family anything about him being born a Jew, the rabbi replies that maybe that is where he should start. After a short argument Lenny has with the rabbi that gets broken up by the head nurse, Zadie (Michele Austin) (whom Lenny instantly develops an attraction to), he and Mahmud leave. On the drive home, Mahmud and Lenny get into another argument, both about their faiths and about how Mahmud blames Lenny for not being a better teacher of Judaism and keeping him from his birth father’s deathbed, until Lenny orders him to get out of his cab. Mahmud gets out, but in parting tells Lenny that he is going to tell his family about his Jewish origins.

When Mahmud enters his house, he calls for his wife and children to come into the living room so he can tell them the truth about himself. However, when he enters the living room, he discovers that his family is already sitting there with Arshad, Uzma, Uzma’s mother Kashmina (Shobu Kapoor), and Tariq and Hazeem. While Mahmud and his family struggle to come across to Arshad like they are devout Muslims, Arshad brings up to Mahmud that he saw the video that Tariq and Hazeem filmed of him burning the kippah at the rally, and after Tariq shows Mahmud the video of it on his phone, Arshad declares that Mahmud has proven his devotion to Islam by doing this, so Rashid and Uzma have his blessing to wed. Then, on Tariq’s request, Arshad sings a song to the family to celebrate the announcement, and an expression comes over Mahmud’s face that indicates that his singing voice is familiar to him somehow.

Suddenly, the doorbell rings, and when Mahmud answers the door, he finds two police officers standing there along with two groups of protestors standing behind them, one composed of Jewish people condemning Mahmud and the other of Muslims supporting him. The officers tell Mahmud that he is under arrest for burning the kippah, since it constitutes a hate crime, and Arshad comes out to face the protestors and condemn Mahmud’s arrest. After looking around at all of the noise and the chaos and being told by the cops that anything he says can and will be used against him, Mahmud cracks and yells out to all that he was born a Jew but was adopted by Muslims. This declaration saves him from being arrested, but it also causes Arshad to withdraw his blessing and force Uzma to come home with him.

The next day, Mahmud’s family leaves him to go stay with Saamiya’s mother, due to Saamiya being furious with Mahmud for lying to her about the reason why he has been making frequent visits to Lenny’s house lately and acting strangely about it, as well as for ruining Rashid’s impending marriage. He also gets a swastika spray-painted on his front door, and an important employee of his taxi firm quits. That night, he aimlessly wanders around town drowning his sorrows with beer until Lenny suddenly shows up and helps him get into his cab, intending to take him back to his house. However, Mahmud tells Lenny to take him back to the Jewish care home instead so he can try to see Izzy once again.

After forcing his way past Zadie at the front door when she refuses to let him in, Mahmud marches up to Izzy’s room and finds the rabbi standing outside the door doing a prayer. He angrily tells the rabbi that he told the world about him being born a Jew and asks him if he ruined his Muslim life enough for him to be allowed to see Izzy, but Zadie catches up to Mahmud and informs him that the rabbi cannot stop this prayer to talk to him because it is Jewish law, and this prayer is a prayer for the dead; Izzy passed away a couple of hours ago. She informs him that Izzy got his package in the mail before he passed, but a confused Mahmud replies that he didn’t send anything. Zadie then offers him a chance to sit in Izzy’s room for a little while to help with the grieving process, and Mahmud accepts. After spending some time sitting on Izzy’s bed in silence, Mahmud decides to play a video in Izzy’s VCR, and he is surprised to find that the tape contains a TV news recording of when he yelled out to everyone in front of his house that he was born a Jew. When he ejects the tape, he discovers that Lenny is responsible for sending this to Izzy because he recorded it on one of his porn tapes, and he also sees that Izzy wrote “Solly” on the label on the bottom of it, showing him that his biological father never forgot about him. Mahmud then meets back up with Lenny in the lobby and more or less thanks him for sending the videotape to Izzy, and Lenny explains that he recorded the news clip on a porn tape because he wanted to motivate Izzy to put it into his VCR right away (though he kept the porn on it so Izzy could die happy). Mahmud then broods over his recent misfortunes and remarks how, because of his Jewish origins, Rashid can’t marry Uzma. Lenny asks him why they can’t just defy Arshad and get married anyway, and Mahmud replies that, while Uzma is a very modern Muslim woman, she stops short of doing anything that would shame her family. Lenny then drives Mahmud home, and we see that Mahmud has taken Izzy’s copy of the Chumash.

After taking a day to read up on both the Quran and the Chumash and studying TV news stories about Arshad (one of which shows that he sometimes develops a serious twitch in his left eye), Mahmud tracks Rashid down to a local sports field the following day where he is running laps. He asks Rashid if he will be going to Arshad’s upcoming lecture because Uzma will likely be there, but Rashid won’t answer him. When he asks Rashid if he knows how Uzma is doing, Rashid breaks his silence and informs him that, because Uzma’s mother is now too frightened to leave Arshad, Uzma is going to have to go with her and Arshad to Waziristan, where the laws are very oppressive for women of her age. Mahmud tells him that he has decided to go to the lecture and take Arshad on, and he did some reading of the Quran and the Old Testament in preparation for it. Rashid replies that he will just end up embarrassing himself in front of the whole Muslim community again because Arshad knows this stuff backwards, and the whole Muslim community will indeed be at this lecture because everyone is interested in what Arshad has to say after Mahmud’s outburst on TV, not just the extremist supporters. Before taking off, Rashid tells his father to “open his eyes,” and these words pique Mahmud’s curiosity.

Mahmud goes to the lecture disguised in a full niqab that he borrowed from a female friend, and he shows signs that he has come up with some sort of plan that will aid him against Arshad when he first approaches Uzma while she is taking tickets at the front door and secretly tells her who he is before handing her a flash drive, plus Lenny quietly enters the auditorium that the lecture is being held in just as it is nearing its end and takes a position beside the room’s light switches. Saamiya and Rashid also make an appearance just after Lenny shows up and stand in the back just to see what Mahmud intends to do. When the lecture ends and Arshad starts to take questions from the audience, Mahmud stands up and asks him one, then takes off the niqab to reveal himself. He then questions Arshad about why Rashid can’t marry Uzma considering that Rashid believes in Allah, and he proceeds to get up onto the stage and point out to everyone that the Muslim and Jewish faiths aren’t completely dissimilar because their names for God are virtually the same. Arshad then tries to embarrass him by gradually exposing how he has not been the most observant Muslim because he doesn’t pray towards Mecca five times a day every day and has drank alcohol, but Mahmud doesn’t deny it, and he tells Arshad that he has also lied to the people he loves the most and been a poor father, and he had been so busy trying to find himself lately that he forgot who he is. He also admits that he has not been the Muslim that he should have been, but he asks the audience if any of them ever truly have been as well. When Arshad questions him about what his name is, he answers that he is Mahmud Nasir, but – for a very short period – he was Solly Shimshillewitz, and he is no longer ashamed of that. He then remarks to everyone that good Muslims should not just never lie about who they are, but who they WERE as well, and he points directly at Arshad as he says this. Then, after informing Arshad that he incorrectly quoted a passage from the Quran that he made moments ago, he tells the audience that there are some genuine Muslim clerics out there who teach people about the Quran and help their fellow Muslims throughout the world, but there are also some clerics out there who are nothing but a bunch of weirdos who make stuff up.

Arshad angrily orders Mahmud to get off his stage and tells him that Rashid will never marry his stepdaughter, but just after he says this, his left eye starts to twitch uncontrollably. Mahmud points this out to him and tells him that that eye twitch is brought on by anger and is a very rare condition called a “blepharospasm”, and he adds that maybe Arshad should “close (his) eyes.” He then signals for Lenny to shut off the lights in the auditorium, and then Uzma plays the contents of the flash drive on a projector that is aimed at a screen behind Arshad that lowers from the ceiling. Mahmud then proceeds to reveal to everyone that Arshad is actually the British pop singer Gary Page (James Floyd), then goes on to explain that he was thought to have committed suicide about ten years ago, and at the time of his “death”, he was trying to avoid a few tax issues as well as nonpayment of child support to five children through five different women. As the final bit of proof that Gary and Arshad are one and the same, a video clip plays of the time when Gary lost his temper at a live performance and used a racial slur against his Arabic bandmate (which started the decline in his popularity), and it shows his blepharospasm acting up afterwards. As he goes over this information, Arshad – realizing that he has been discovered – sneaks off the stage, and Mahmud sees him affecting an escape out the back door dressed in his old Gary Page clothes. However, before he goes, he looks at Mahmud and gives him a verbal acknowledgement of respect in an English accent for getting the best of him. Mahmud is praised by his family and most of the other people in attendance for exposing Arshad, and when Rashid asks him how he figured out that Arshad was Gary, he tells Rashid that he initially suspected that they were the same guy when he recognized his singing tone when he sang to them during his visit to their house, but he didn’t really put the whole picture together until he told him to “open his eyes” (since that reminded him of “Close Your Eyes,” which was the name of one of Gary’s hit songs). He then hugs his family, and Uzma comes up to and embraces Rashid.

Mahmud resumes his regular life, and he gives Lenny the vacant job at his taxi firm. Rashid and Uzma get married, and Lenny is invited to the ceremony and brings Zadie as his date. Mahmud and Lenny end up getting into another argument about their faiths at the reception (albeit a less hostile one) to close out the movie.