Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri got his start as Quentin Tarantino’s camera assistant, and in 1998 made the excellent “West Beirut,” about the start of the Lebanese civil war. His latest film has been banned by his native country as well other Arab nations, and that kind of political censorship earns it some automatic goodwill.
It’s frustrating, then, that “The Attack” starts out strong and swiftly unravels somewhere past the midpoint. Amin (Ali Suliman) is a Palestinian surgeon who’s thoroughly assimilated into Tel Aviv society. One night he tends to the victims of a suicide bombing that took place at a children’s birthday party. He awakens early the next morning to find that the carnage was caused by his own wife, and the Israeli authorities are determined to find out what he knows.
But Ali knows nothing, and when he’s released — after some Guantanamo-like interrogation — he sets out to discover what motivated his seemingly happy wife to perpetrate such a crime. And it’s here that the movie begins to go awry, when he returns to the West Bank to ask questions, and the platitude-mouthing characters he meets there have none of the rounded immediacy of their Tel Aviv counterparts. His wife, seen in flashback, never becomes anything more than a plot construct.
Despite a remarkable performance by Suliman, who’s almost never off-camera, events become increasingly pat and implausible, with one explanatory scene played like a shadowy variation on Kevin Spacey’s monologue in “Se7en.” It’s a movie trying hard to suggest there are no easy answers, yet Doueiri can’t seem to help offering the audience just that.