Mixed-Up Kids
A review of Maryam.

By Michael Potemra, NR literary editor
March 8, 2002 12:40 p.m.

he movie Maryam explores familiar territory — what it's like to be an American high-school girl dealing with the demands of popularity in general and dating in particular, and the often less-than-reasonable demands made by parents. But it tackles this universal predicament in a very crisply drawn particular situation: It's 1979, the U.S. and Iran are at daggers drawn — and our young heroine is an Iranian-American.

Maryam is a winsome youth, well incarnated by the sweet Mariam Parris, and it's hard not to sympathize with her. She is the epitome of assimilation, rebelling modestly against the strictures of her parents. Her cousin Ali, a fanatical supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini, comes to the U.S. to study — and disapproves of Maryam's American easygoingness even more than her parents do. Ali is played by David Ackert with a fascinating combination of brooding intensity and kindhearted vulnerability — far from the stereotype of the religious fanatic one finds in lesser movies.

Maryam's coming-of-age story is also an analogy for America and the meaning of assimilation. In the process of growing up — just as in the process of becoming American — earlier authorities must be overthrown, and a new sense of self established; but the highest values and insights of the earlier authorities will remain, interiorized in the mature person. Maryam will grow up to be a bourgeois individualist and thorough suburbanite; but she will not despise her roots, nor her family members who still abide by the earlier codes.

The atmosphere of the late 1970s, too, is convincingly recreated — just one of the many pleasures of this fine, insightful drama