An elderly woman recently told me that when she saw The Silence of the Lambs, back in 1991, she couldn’t follow the plot. What would she think of Ajami? This Israeli import seems to be well-intended, and the international film-festival circuit tends to laud the good intentions of those whose cameras examine the streets on which downtrodden minorities attempt to peaceably cohabit. Say what you will about the conflict over Palestine, but most Israeli films that make it across the pond(s) seem to be on the ball; moral, political, and spiritual ambiguities are all accounted for in ways that—certainly before Sept. 11, and probably still today—may seem exotic to many American moviegoers. Take Ari Folman’s thoughtful, innovative Waltz with Bashir (2008), for instance, or Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005)—about a pair of antsy suicide bombers who underwent an American Graffiti switcheroo before detonating. The substance of Ajami—which takes its name from a seedy Muslim/Christian quarter of Tel Aviv—isn’t terribly crude or facile; but the structure is wildly overdone.

It’s the sort of synthesis that older generations would, in vain, adjust their hearing aides to comprehend: a neorealist thriller. (One could argue that classics like Carol Reed’s were in this vein, but his street scenes hosted movie stars.) The Italian neorealists who exposed the bombed-out penury of their native land generally told simple stories with a skeleton cast of nonprofessional actors. Plot-wise, The Bicycle Thief (1948) is nothing more than a poor old bloke trying to get his bike back and ending up as much the eponymous villain as the man who initially wronged him. Without explicitly falling into any partisan-political traps, Thief took society to task; a complex mess necessitates a complex solution. This seems to be the point of view of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, who wrote and directed Ajami—and cast screen-virgin thespians, to boot. With one exception—by my calculations—all the crimes perpetrated here result from flukes; people are driven to crime by misunderstandings: by debts that, in a just world, they wouldn’t have incurred. Nineteen-year-old Omar (Shahir Kabaha) must protect his family from mafiosi that his uncle’s itchy trigger finger has offended; the Bedouin gangsters, in retaliation, whack a 15-year-old they’ve mistaken for Omar. (Omar dodges a few bullet-holes here, but the movie suffers a self-inflicted wound: We see little of how the victim’s family reacts, nor any apologia issued to them by Omar’s.) Another of the film’s protagonists—there are three of ’em—is the 16-year-old Malek (Ibrahim Frege); he’s resorted to crime because he needs to support his ailing mother. The backlash from one of the film’s two Romeo and Juliet-styled, religiously incompatible romances also helps to force Malek’s reluctant, tremulous hand.

Their liberal casuistry simplifies issues a bit, but Copti and Shani’s perspective is not intellectually disrespectable. It’s probably closer to the truth than any other criminological catchall; and it certainly goes down more smoothly than the tripe distinction between good and evil that’s been an interminable staple of the Hollywood diet—a shoot-’em-up lineage that was upheld by John Wayne and his spur-wearing ilk, continued by George Lucas’s Jedi, and has recently clogged the arty arteries of No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight. But the makers of Ajami have taken their sentiments, jammed them into a blender with a couple dozen plots and an enormous, multilingual cast, and then flung globs of their pâté in every direction. Their storytelling has the pacing and stability of a food fight. The framework certainly isn’t random; the plot goop eventually congeals. But it takes well over an hour to get one’s bearings, and the collation would have been a whole lot fresher if the blender had simply been omitted, and the story served up straight. Everything is chopped up just so that one can see the filmmakers’ prowess in piecing it back together; they’re like chefs who want you to admire the cooking more than the meal.

As a friend of mine griped, Ajami ticks by in Inglourious Basterds time. It’s divided into chapters, but even they are not chronologically ordered. The characters eventually Crash into one another, but not before the viewer is caught in a morass of people and subplots; and since Copti and Shani keep the audience persistently on edge, the tone is often too monotonous to parse out the essentials. By the ending credits, I “got” most of it—some things, like the details concerning a pocket watch, were a little too smudged in there or convenient for me to buy—but I would have rather spent my mental efforts observing and comprehending the flavor of life in this country. (Ajami certainly isn’t propaganda for Israel’s tourism industry.) The characters are too harried to learn much about, and some of them are a little too easily innocent. Omar’s little brother narrates the tale; his function is merely to drain our sympathies. (This little artist is so sensitive he’s clairvoyant.) He relates his life in comic-book frames—maybe that helps to explain the hyperbolic narrative. Commercial jigsaw structures work for movies like Inglourious Basterds and Shutter Island because those films were, respectively, a trifle and an analogue for psychosis. (The former may have been a symptom of psychosis.) In Ajami, the puzzling construction holds our attention for the sake of holding our attention; it helps to sell the thesis, I guess, but it doesn’t correlate with the characters’ experiences. They are not confused; they have clear motives; they know what’s up. Why must we be stuck taking notes? The movie was almost certainly conceived for international distribution, but the filmmakers’ style makes non-Israelis feel like tourists whose G.P.S. devices have failed them. We’re in a sketchy neighborhood, and without a map—too busy fretting over the best way out to concern ourselves with the plight of the locals.