When Freida Pinto made it big on the international stage with “Slumdog Millionaire“, there were quite a few who couldn’t quite believe her success.

While she was feted all over the world, found herself on prestigious magazine covers and on high-profile red carpets, in the country of her birth, there was some reluctant praise and a lot of silence which is unusual for a country that “adopts” anyone who sounds remotely Indian and is a success in the West.

After ‘Slumdog’, Pinto got to work with two of Hollywood’s biggest directors, Woody Allen and Julian Schnabel (”The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”), and I think I have seen more press about Anil Kapoor playing a bit role in the American TV series “24″ than Pinto’s appearances in these two films.

And now that the two films have done the rounds of the festival circuit and the reviews haven’t been too good, there are media reports again — almost writing her off as an actor.

I wish we would appreciate that she has been where even the biggest guns from Bollywood tried to go and failed. She has shared the stage as an equal with names such as Anthony Hopkins and didn’t have to rely on being the geeky Indian friend/sidekick kind of roles to make her foray into Hollywood.

I think we just can’t believe we didn’t discover her first.

While any film addressing the Israeli-Palestinian divide can expect a measure of controversy, few hearts or minds are likely to be stirred by Julian Schnabel’s inoffensive, well-intentioned “Miral.” Schnabel’s signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga of four Arab women living under Israeli occupation, the youngest of which, Miral, emerges a bland totem of hope rather than a compelling movie subject. A year-end Stateside release date will raise expectations unlikely to be borne out by either passionate critical response or sustained arthouse biz.
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Bound to raise perhaps the most criticism is the casting of Pinto, the Indian actress-model who came to fame in “Slumdog Millionaire,” in the role of an Arab Everygirl — an odd choice for a drama predicated on specifics of cultural identity. While Pinto looks appropriately willful, driven and occasionally fierce as Miral clashes with her loving guardians (and is later whipped in prison for her suspected terrorist involvement), neither she nor the material convincingly demonstrates why, of the countless stories that have been told about the conflict, this one was worth singling out.

Some of the dialogue in Miral is portentous in the extreme. Characters deliver lines like “this is a very crucial moment for our country – our people can’t take it any more” rather than speaking in anything that remotely resembles normal speech. There are distracting cameos from stars like Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe, who are on screen for a few moments and then disconcertingly disappear from the story without trace. Schnabel is covering three generations but his storytelling style is more cumbersome than nimble. At its most leaden, this is more like a school lecture in Middle Eastern history than it is a piece of drama. Newsreel footage is thrown into the mix in heavy-handed fashion and characters – as they age – suddenly go very grey. Quiet domestic scenes and climactic political moments are juxtaposed in seemingly random manner. Even so, it’s hard not to root for Husseini (played with great dignity by Abbass) as she tries to educate the orphan kids and thereby save them from a rootless existence in the refugee camps. Miral herself is played very engagingly by Freida Pinto as a mischievous and idealistic teenager with an acute sense of natural justice.

Enlightening neither as emotional essay nor as straight-up history lecture, then, “Miral”‘s tricksy oat-bran filmmaking seemingly lands shy of every imaginable target audience: it’s too dry for the middlebrow awards set that might otherwise thrill to its superficially good intentions, too didactic for the highbrow intelligentsia that turned out for the director’s previous outings, and too dull for just about everybody. “I feel so useless, I really want to do something,” frets Miral midway through the movie; it’s representative of the film’s minimal emotional investment in its protagonist that the reply to this confession is: “You have beautiful eyes.”

Clearly, Schnabel was stirred by this book to bring it to the screen, but Slumdog Millionaire star Pinto, while gorgeous, is not an expressive actress. (She likely helped to raise funding for the film produced by Jon Kilik with financing from Israel, Italy, India and France, which The Weinstein Co. will release stateside.) Her story remains expositional and flat, filled with long debates with her boyfriend Hani (Omar Metwally) about alternative routes to a Middle East solution. “What they really want is all of Palestine without Palestinians,” says Hani. “With them here there is no future for us.”

This kind of earnest agit-prop material is tough to adapt to the screen; Schnabel needed a more proficient dramatist to pull this off. He’s an elegant, visual director—he and cinematographer Eric Gautier adopt an unusual blurry technique for the more intense scenes—but this movie, while filmed on authentic Jerusalem locations, too often devolves into dull talking heads. It’s possible that the Weinsteins will fan flames of controversy around this film’s highly-charged subject. Nonetheless Miral—which will also play Telluride and Toronto—will likely remain within a narrow art-house niche.

Perhaps because of the delegating, “Miral” falls short of Schnabel’s usual standards. A flatly narrated and sometimes simplistic melodrama, it lacks the mystery and mastery of “Diving Bell.” Schnabel’s judgment seems blurred by his personal feelings.

Where his talent shines through is in the visual effects. Nadia’s abuse is shown through her eyes: A pole representing her bedstead appears on the screen while the camera makes bobbing vertical movements. Subsequent sequences — a belly dance, a drowning — are shot in a swooping, hazy style, as if they were hallucinations.

These artistic touches are a highpoint of the film. So are the Arab cast members, who give the story a lived-in quality, and Schnabel’s daughter Stella, who has a cameo as a fun-loving, open-minded Israeli girl.

The film’s other plus is its timely message: that violence and maximalism are no substitute for dialogue. It’s a message Schnabel seeks to convey for the foreseeable future. He told the assembled media that he’d stop making films for a couple of years, the better to promote this one.