The word pedophile is going to get thrown around a lot when people discuss Aaron Eckhart’s character in Alan Ball’s gutsy and big-hearted new film Towelhead, but it’s the wrong word. That’s not a minor distinction in my mind, as Eckhart’s character, an Army reservist and suburban family man during the first Gulf War, isn’t your standard child molester – he’s attracted to a young girl who is in the first flush of her sexual awakening, an age that the modern media continues to eroticize. Towelhead is, among other things, about how hard it is to be an adolescent girl in the modern world, to be becoming a sexual person while being objectified by the world around you – and at the same time being punished and victimized for that objectification. Thinking of Eckhart as a simple pedophile robs the film of all its meaning.

19 year old Summer Bishil plays the 13 year old girl, Jasira, who moves in with her Lebanese father in Texas when her white mother’s boyfriend shows too much interest in her – he shaves her bikini area. Maria Bello, who was in three Sundance films this year, plays the mother as a terrible harridan who tells Jasira that it was all her fault. How can a man be expected to react, she asks, when Jasira walks around with her boobs pushed out all the time? Jasira’s dad is a bachelor who lives in Houston, and he moves to the suburbs so that his daughter can get a better education. A Middle Eastern family moving into the Texas burbs on the eve of the first Gulf War could be the backdrop for some heavy racial drama, and while the film’s title tells you that this angle is explored, the ethnic tension just really another way that Jasira finds herself excluded and yet desired. Sexual, beautiful and exotic, she’s constantly being pulled between being wanted and being rejected.

I wasn’t a huge fan of American Beauty. I found the movie to be too obvious, too on the nose and, worst of all, too simple-minded in its themes and conceits. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see Ball return to suburbia, especially in another movie that had a grown man falling in love with jail bait and a conflict with the military man next door, but years of Six Feet Under seem to have helped Ball move away from the glaringly obvious. The book on which the film is based, by Alicia Erian, also offers Ball a more complicated tapestry from which to work, both plotwise and from a thematic point of view. This is a rich movie, with a lot to say about the world we’ve created for ourselves.

What’s most impressive about Towelhead is how much Ball loves these characters, even giving Eckhart touching grace notes. He’s not judging these people (well, Bello’s character doesn’t come off too well in the long run), but he’s not afraid of showing their darker sides while acknowledging that they also have good sides. It’s refreshing, especially in a movie that can be as hot button as this one, and it’s the kind of approach that might confuse and anger less thoughtful moviegoers.

Ball has assembled a terrific, if lowkey, cast here. Bishil captures the conflicted heart of Jasira perfectly, showing us through subtle body movements and gestures the war going on between her head and her groin. Aaron Eckhart doesn’t go for the simplistic Texan military man stereotypes and as such creates a character who is fully alive and real – and often one who you can empathize with. My favorite performance, though, is that of Peter Macdissi, Jasira’s father. Fussy and effete, Macdissi plays his role often for snarky laughs, but he can also turn on your expectations and brings moments of real menace – and real wounded humanity – to the role. The casting is a huge part of Ball’s genius way of dealing with each of these characters as real, understandable people.

There’s explicit sexuality in Towelhead that will shock some. Another journalist at Sundance, who hadn’t seen the film, wondered to me why Alan Ball would even want to make a movie about this subject. To me that question is its own answer; the way that society sexualizes young girls is something that we don’t address because it makes us uncomfortable. Ball looks the issue squarely in the face and, instead of delivering epiphanies like he did in American Beauty, he leaves us to examine the shards of perspective and truth. And in the end he has the courage to make a wonderful, sex-positive statement; it’s perhaps the movie’s closing scene that will send Puritanical Americans out of the theater with the most unease. To me it was uplifting, and I imagine it will be to the millions of women who identify with Jasira’s struggles.

8.5 out of 10