Who's in It: JJ Feild, Said Taghmaoui
The Basics: Two American friends, one Jewish and one Arab, decide to go to Jerusalem in the 1940s, just as everything starts to blow up and everybody embarks on a 60-year-plus adventure of war, retaliation, interventionism, oppression and terrorism. At one point, the Jewish guy says something like, "I came here for peace," which kind of turns it into an unintentional comedy right then and there.
What's the Deal? O filmmakers, how is it that you were able to take the historical true story of the bitter struggle over Jerusalem and turn it into something they might show on the Hallmark Channel? How does one boil down complicated events into a soap opera? These are rhetorical questions, obviously. If they could be answered, then the problems could be avoided and everything would be Citizen Kane or The Adventures of Milo & Otis.
Fatal Flaw: Weird neutrality, that the movie has to bend over backwards to achieve — even as the Jewish guy actually shoots and kills a member of his Arab friend's family, accompanied by dramatic music — and is usually accomplished by blaming the British for everything. And you still won't buy it.
What Is Ian Holm Doing in this Movie? Another rhetorical question. But he's got funny wild white hair flying all over the place and he, along with everyone else in the cast, spends the movie making speechy-speechy about what a mess everyone's made of beautiful Jerusalem.
What to See Instead: Almost any documentary about the subject, or Paradise Now, the painfully personal movie about Palestinian suicide bombers from 2005.