I can think of no other film in recent years that has infuriated and delighted me as much as Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention.

I'll be the first to admit there's an enormous contradiction there. There are things about Suleiman's film that I find dishonest, morally repulsive and even potentially dangerous. At the same time, there are few movies in recent memory that have shined brighter than this one, if only in fits and starts, and few films that have shown more promise.

Maybe that's to be expected. Divine Intervention is, after all, a movie from that tiny swath of bitterly disputed soil sometimes referred to as The Promised Land.

Divine Intervention shows so much promise, in fact, that when this otherwise fine little film starts sneaking in cheap shots in service of what I find to be a vaguely sinister, single-minded political agenda — and hoping we won't notice the deception — it feels a little too much like being betrayed by a friend.

My reasons for admiring Divine Intervention are many, and I'll get to them in a moment. My reasons for disliking the film boil down to its willingness to trade in mean-spirited agitprop that compromises the movie's artistic integrity and oversimplifies a dangerously complicated political situation. At the risk of over-stating the case, it's hard not to consider Hitler's protégé Leni Reifenstahl, who made profoundly poetic films that (inadvertently, according to Leni) helped inspire an entire nation to make sympathetic and even mythic figures of the architects of genocide.

Suleiman's ambitions aren't nearly so grand. For that matter, the vast majority of his film is so humble, so humorous and so benignly human, that it's all the more insidious when the vile, political muck-a-muck starts creeping in. When Divine Intervention is good, it's very good. But when it's bad, it's very, very bad.

Suleiman sets his film in and around the cities and towns of Israel and the Palestinian West Bank — neighborhoods with which the director is intimately acquainted. Suleiman, who identifies himself as a Palestinian, is an Arab who was born and raised in Israel, although much of his life has been spent in the United States and Europe. For that matter, although it was indeed filmed in various Israeli and Palestinian locations, Divine Intervention would not have been possible without European financing and French production facilities.

There are really two films duking it out in Divine Intervention. One is funny, nimble and engagingly bizarre. The other is shallow, lead-footed and hypocritical, a life-affirming, humanist enterprise that professes crazy love for all, but apparently has no problem with demonizing every one of its Israeli characters. The first film — the "good" Divine Intervention — is full of sly, droll wit that often recalls the deadpan cool of Jim Jarmusch crossed with the spot-on timing and elegant physical comedy of Jacques Tati or even Buster Keaton. The early sections of the film unfold as a series of absurd minimalist vignettes that have the understated impact of inspired non sequiturs, even as they dovetail in surreal and unexpectedly rewarding ways. A pair of neighbors secretly throw trash into each other's yards; a cranky guy uses the broken bottles he obsessively collects to pop the neighborhood kids' soccer ball; a hospital ward full of gravely ill patients leave their rooms en masse for a mammoth cigarette break.

About halfway through the film, the director himself shows up (playing a thinly veiled version of himself known only as "E.S."), and that's where Divine Intervention begins to lose its way. The open-ended, universal burlesque of the film's first half all-too-quickly hardens and calcifies as regional politics threaten to obscure and eventually consume the movie's art. The odd little interlocking sketches become increasingly didactic and, frankly, cruel, progressing from a sight gag involving an Israeli tank being blown up (by a discarded apricot pit, no less) to depictions of Jewish soldiers as screaming, simple-minded sadists.

The movie ends with an extended special effects sequence in which a flying, supernaturally powerful Palestinian female ninja defeats a squadron of tough Israeli commandos by driving Islamic star-and-crescent-shape darts through the men's skulls. The scene takes the form of a kitschy, over-the-top cartoon, but the too-close-for-comfort proximity to real life — and the fact that Suleiman is surely aware that certain audiences will be "inspired" by his murderous fantasy sequence — left me gasping in disbelief and disgust.

E.S., whose hound-dog poker face and perpetual silence unavoidably evokes Keaton, becomes the movie's physical manifestation of pent-up Palestinian rage and frustration. He's involved in some of the movie's funniest and most poignant bits, but he's also the one blowing up the tank, as well as the one who floats a balloon, tauntingly adorned with Yassir Arafat's mug, high above the disputed city of Jerusalem. E.S. also spends a lot of time sitting in his parked car with his beautiful girlfriend, glaring at mean old soldiers haranguing poor, innocent Palestinians at those infamous Israeli checkpoints.

There's a ridiculous and childlike aspect to everyone in the film, but while the movie's adult Palestinians are painted as endearing innocents, its Jewish characters are relegated to the role of spoiled, unlikable brats, at best. At worst, they're depicted as signifiers of some sort of Ultimate Evil. It's unbecoming of Suleiman, who clearly springs from a tradition of filmmaker-humorists who revel in human folly and embrace all of their characters as equally remarkable despite (and sometimes because of) their flaws. The director's inability to resist the temptation of dividing characters into rigid categories of Oppressors and Oppressed is the single most significant factor in keeping Divine Intervention from being the marvelous film it almost is.

What Suleiman winds up giving us is an infuriating mix of brilliant filmmaking and disingenuous propaganda. On the one hand, how can we ignore the incendiary political agenda tucked away within the gentle slapstick, or the clumsy bits of overstatement like the final image of a pressure cooker bubbling away? On the other hand, how can we fail to smile at the wonderfully self-deprecating, world-weary humor threaded throughout this deeply flawed gem?

The funny thing about that particular brand of wry, fatalistic buffoonery that informs Divine Intervention is that, ironically enough, it often seems lifted directly from time-honored routines of Jewish comedians and the world of Yiddish theater. The irony might even be intentional. After all, what better punch line to Suleiman's grim little joke in which eternally persecuted, suffering and wandering Palestinians come to resemble nothing so much as the New Jews?

Now if he could only find a little sympathy in his heart for the old ones, Suleiman's next film could well be that masterpiece that's clearly in him.

Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.

This article appears in Jun 5-11, 2003.