Movies: Terrorists Get Their Close-Up

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That is bound to strike some as America bashing; the attempts to flesh out terrorists, excuse making. But making them human shows us they are not superhuman: they make mistakes, they get emotional, they have doubts. Each of them may, at some point, be stopped. In Paradise Now, from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, Said (Kais Nashif) seems like an ordinary slacker auto mechanic until he is chosen to undertake a suicide bombing, which he volunteered for long before. Said comes across not as a news-article composite but as a believable, mixed-up young man. In the U.S. he might have been the star of a coming-of-age story; in Nablus he ends up with a bomb taped to his chest.

That quotidian depiction of terrorism has made Paradise Now controversial, not just among Israelis. "Extremist Palestinians say by humanizing these people, there is nothing holy in them," says Abu-Assad. "My opinion is they are human beings, whether you like it or not." And like it or not, the need to understand them didn't begin with 9/11, nor will it end anytime soon.