This is one of those polarizing movies which would be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial if made in America, but Israel still has some elites on the pro-Israel side of their debates, so…yeah. The real problem with it, though, is that it’s a three-act play where the first and third acts are just kind of miserable. The first act is redeemed by the intensity of the drama and artful (if claustrophobic) cinematography, but the third act…isn’t. This is doubtless deliberate, but I wasn’t sure why I had been called to the theater, frankly.

This will be a spoiler heavy recap here. Very little was a surprise in this film, though. It’s not really set up that way.

Very effective camerawork in act one.

Act One has a mother opening her apartment door only to be told that her son has died in service. The military messengers are on top of it, catching her when she swoons and having a syringe of (presumably) sedative ready. The rest of the act primarily concerns the father being briefed on how the funeral arrangements and processions will go. The father, while not freaking out, is not really handling things well. And at the end of the act, we discover that, no, the son isn’t dead at all, it was someone else with the same name. This is when the father loses it and demand his son, Yonatan, be immediately returned from his post.

Act Two is Yonatan at his post at the Foxtrot station. This is a fairly light-hearted and entertaining series of vignettes as he and his fellow soldiers stave off boredom, and deal with the weird sort of tension that comes from being in the middle of nowhere on a security detail where maybe one car comes through every eight hours, often driven by the same guy. A freak happenstance results the soldiers mistakenly killing a car full of (presumably innocent) young (presumable) arabs. And as Yonatan is struggling with the guilt, he is called back home for reasons unknown (to him).

Camel’s: Nature’s Sand Clowns

Act Three begins with mom and dad some months later—and Yonatan is dead. Apparently he never made it back. There are recriminations and grief, and it’s just miserable because you know this time, it’s for real. The mom gets more screen time (she’s mostly sedated in Act One), and there are some good moments here, but it basically borders on grief porn.

It’s not that I didn’t like it; I just wasn’t compelled by it. I kept looking for something to raise it to a higher plane but all the metaphors seemed so ham-handed (on the one hand) and so minor on the other. The very title, Foxtrot, is (as is explained) a dance where you always end up right where you started.

Huh.

The father isn’t admirable. He tells a story of trading in his family’s heirloom bible for a skin magazine, which he presents to Yonatan as a teen. Further, he’s hiding his own act of cowardice (beyond stealing the family bible and lying about it) that his son knows about. We actually don’t learn about the Mom much, and probably less still about their daughter. They’re a secular family (of course) so they have no tools to deal with their grief, but this feels like a void which the story itself rejects filling.

I mean, look at this morose mofo.

The accidental deaths in Act 2 feel very forced. It’s so dull and so low-key out at Foxtrot, the idea that Yonatan is sitting with his finger on the trigger of a machine gun aimed at a car of kids—including a girl he’s flirting with—was a stretch.

It’s the sort of amorphous leftist war-is-bad-so-disarm-before-the-enemies-who-would-kill-you kind of anti-war message that goes over like a lead balloon among Israelis who don’t want to die, but compared to the America-is-Evil propaganda we get here, it seems pretty lightweight. I’m sure that message is what wins over the bulk of the critics.

It’s the lack of a genuinely larger issue, in my eyes, that makes it less worthwhile. It really does end up feeling like it has no other point than making one feel bad about the situation while offering no solution other than surrender. In the end, we all liked it all right, and really appreciated the artistry of the first two acts.

The Flower found it appealing as she’s reading the Bible lately, and appreciating God’s difficulty with his “stiff-necked” people. “They can’t get away from God!” she exclaims! My kids are funny.

Once again, the star of our show, The Dromedary.