A welcome surprise! The previews made it look like another sensitive, lyrical piece about the indomitable human spirit, and it's that right enough, but in large part this is galumphing comedy of the sort Walter Matthau appeared in late in his career: a grumpy old man gathers his two grown sons for a road trip to bring back the old man's runaway wife. As they bicker and roar through the countryside, it feels like we've come in at the fifth or sixth sequel in a popular and long-running series. On the road again! The old complaints and small irritations; the blustery overreactions, little storms that blow up and blow over – they all seem familiar, lived-in and lived with. So do the trailing-off sentences, the tags of jokes that don't have to be finished
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What differentiates Marooned from the other grumpy comedies is that this is a family of Kurds, and the wife, in leaving, crossed an imaginary line on the map, into the northeastern corner of Iraq, at a time when Iraqi jets are dropping bombs and strafing refugees, as Saddam toys with them murderously. It's a society of villages on the run: in one place, houses that seem rooted in the rock stand abandoned; while another place that seems no place at all suddenly blossoms with color and activity and voices – a village in the making, or just a camp on the road? A cluster of refugee tents is already a neighborhood, with its landmarks and close-knitting. Schools and marketplaces, hastily improvised, turn quite substantial, though they might still disappear overnight. And wherever the old man and his sons travel, complete strangers recognize them and ask about them: they had been famous as a family band of musicians, but broke up when the wife first became disaffected. Everyone hopes they'll get back together. The beautiful songs and musical interludes are essential to the picture, they complete it. Comedy, tragedy, music – Marooned in Iraq, rag-tag and splendorous in equal measure, encompasses it all.
What differentiates Marooned from the other grumpy comedies is that this is a family of Kurds, and the wife, in leaving, crossed an imaginary line on the map, into the northeastern corner of Iraq, at a time when Iraqi jets are dropping bombs and strafing refugees, as Saddam toys with them murderously. It's a society of villages on the run: in one place, houses that seem rooted in the rock stand abandoned; while another place that seems no place at all suddenly blossoms with color and activity and voices – a village in the making, or just a camp on the road? A cluster of refugee tents is already a neighborhood, with its landmarks and close-knitting. Schools and marketplaces, hastily improvised, turn quite substantial, though they might still disappear overnight. And wherever the old man and his sons travel, complete strangers recognize them and ask about them: they had been famous as a family band of musicians, but broke up when the wife first became disaffected. Everyone hopes they'll get back together. The beautiful songs and musical interludes are essential to the picture, they complete it. Comedy, tragedy, music – Marooned in Iraq, rag-tag and splendorous in equal measure, encompasses it all.