Syriana So What?
Marc Cooper blog
I just came back from the Burbank studios of Warner Bros. where I saw a screening of the new thriller, Syriana.
In a word: disappointing.
Syriana’s commercial tag-line might, indeed, be “Everything is Connected” but its 126 minutes made me feel like I was pitched into a roiling sea of free-radical dots with very little coherence at all. As I watched a particularly gruesome scene of George Clooney’s character getting his fingernails pulled out, I breifly considered if it might be worth my time to trade places with him.
Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, (award-winning writer of “Traffic”), Syriana bludgeons you with the relentless message that you are watching something Terribly Important – but I couldn’t quite figure out exactly what that something was.
No question that the flick was an admirable exercise in the sort of risk-taking to which Hollywood is downright phobic. And it’s clearly an Adult Film in the very best sense of the phrase. So an “A” for effort and a courtesy, gentleman’s “C” for the final product.
All I came away with were notions I think I already knew: oil companies are greedy and ruthless; government is a pawn in the hands of such powers; and the CIA kills people it doesn’t like and is perfectly willing to eat its own when expedient. Oh yeah, there was a whole subplot in this weave of disparate narratives about Iran and some sort of neo-connish Committee to Liberate Iran, but one of you viewers out there is going to have to explain that part to me. There was also a thematic undertow that American oil politics are the principal source of evil flowing from that region of the world and that if we could only redirect energy priorities we’d be on the brink of a new Beloved Community.
But to you righties who suspect Syriana is some sort of liberal propaganda – have no fear. To even begin to make sense of the plot, you’d have to be fully immersed in a deep understanding of Middle Eastern politics and if you knew that much, you’re quite unlikely to be moved from your position by this film alone.
George Clooney’s performance as a flabby and burned-out CIA operative is superb. But it is the only human performance in the dry cinematic desert that is this film. And this is a film I wanted to like.
After the screening, writer/director Gaghan made an appearance for a Q & A session. Arianna Huffington, who co-hosted the screening, started off that portion of the evening by joking about how difficult the movie was to understand and requires collective interpretation. "Warner Bros. strategy is to sell tickets to this movie in groups of five," she cracked. After she asked Gaghan to comment on this, he rambled on disjointedly for a solid 25 minutes without taking a break. I don’t think he completed one whole coherent sentence. Frankly, I was a bit shocked by his scattershot talk. Much worse than his movie.
Syriana is most reminiscent of the 1975 Robert Redford thriller, Three Days of the Condor; except Condor was an infinitely better movie that packs a much bigger political wallop.
I can’t help remarking that just 24 hours before the Syriana screening, I saw the new Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. I know there’s war going on and that the world is coming to an end and everything, but I loved Walk The Line. As a movie it’s twice or thrice the film that Syriana is. I admit to a certain partiality to anything Joaquin Phoenix does, but his portrayal of The Man In Black was mind-blowing. Reese Witherspoon turned in an equally masterful rendering of June Carter. And I was left dumbstruck at the end of the movie when I learned that Phoenix and Witherspoon did all the singing by themselves. Go see both films. And sound off.
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