"Corruption keeps us safe. Corruption keeps us warm. Corruption is why we're in here, not out there fighting for scraps. Corruption is why we win."
"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
Startling words, stirring sentiment, relevant ideas.
And for all the political passion in perpetual fashion in Hollywood, neither comment, as spoken onscreen, got within a boom mike's reach of my gut.
It's the Year of Living Ideologically in Poli-Wood—witness such current events-powered releases as Jarhead (soldiers in Iraq), Lord of War (arms-dealing) and The Constant Gardener (drug-company shenanigans); the upcoming Munich (terrorism through the retro-lens of the slaughter of Israeli athletes in 1972, and its aftermath of retribution) and Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (self-explanatory, more or less, starring Albert Brooks); and a trifecta of planned 9/11 dramas, including one from Oliver Stone.
But it's George Clooney at the center of this cinematic social spasm with Good Night, and Good Luck (director, co-star, co-screenwriter) and Syriana (co-star, executive producer). Beyond admiring his multiple talents and screen likability, I respect Clooney's political convictions. And I'm unmoved by his political films, which squander those talents.
Nothing douses a lust for history like a mere history lesson (Good Night) or defuses the newsy immediacy of a world in crisis like a glorified illustrated lecture (Syriana).
Good Night, the retelling of CBS icon Edward R. Murrow's epic battle with Red-baiting blowhard Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early '50s, is as ripe and juicy a topic as has ever been committed to a dry and distant film. An approximately 90-minute run-through told from a cool distance, it unspools like a history-class visual aid of a convulsive American moment, filmed in black and white to approximate the era's TV, but literally draining any color out of its characters.
Good Night has no meat on its bones to feed our emotional hunger. It's a lean piece of pseudo-journalism, facts, names, dates and places neatly arranged, even actual footage of the sweaty junior senator from Wisconsin. And one hell of a Murrow impersonation by David Strathairn. At best, however, it's a big-name docudrama that teaches, but never touches—which is how Hollywood teaches best: With empathy. With characters who force us to care about them, and through them, about the vital concerns that embroil them and speak to us.
The omission of any genuine engagement with an audience is even more glaring in the intense but soulless Syriana (D.C.-speak for reshaping the Middle East): It's as if writer-director Stephen Gaghan and producer Clooney—gun-shy about fending off ideological critics, treading lightly with red-state moviegoers to avoiding alienating them from a film he especially wants them to see—chose the safe side of the emotional divide that separates the theoretical (thinking about issues) from the empathetic (feeling about issues).
(Consider the contrasting irony that a documentary, traditionally a detached, measured film form, ignited the most inflamed political passions recently: Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, at least minimally purporting journalism. ... OK, advocacy journalism. ... OK, ideological flame-throwing. But it triggered more partisan bickering and intensity—and healthy debate about our world—than Syriana will provoke, for all its oil-industry indictments and conspiracy count-offs.)
Trotting around the globe in English and Arabic to pull the lid off the entire geopolitical stinkpot and reveal the power-playing snakes slithering around inside—CIA duplicity, Middle East political machinations, government antitrust violations, that damned oil bidness—Syriana provides a small nation of sketch-people to think about, and no characters to give a rat's ass about:
Clooney's abandoned CIA operative, the only guy we come close to caring about, especially after a gruesome implied torture scene; Christopher Plummer's regally intimidating law-firm boss; a principled prince (Alexander Siddig); a go-go energy analyst and his wary wife (Matt Damon and Amanda Peet); a D.C. attorney working on an oil-company merger (Jeffrey Wright); a reptilian oilman (Chris Cooper); downtrodden Pakistani oil workers, and on and on (the cast is overstuffed with I-think-I-know-him actors in supporting roles).
Only small moments with relatives—Clooney dining with his son, Wright contending with an alcoholic father, Damon and Peet briefly bemoaning the loss of a child—imply they might be complex people with deeper lives, but they feel more like Gaghan's forced, fleeting acknowledgement of emotional investment that slows his rhythm. But Syriana plays like a droning drumbeat of sterile storytelling.
Plot threads abound like a sweater unraveling, underscored by conspiracies, while capitalism takes a pounding. Then a self-congratulatory oil bigwigs' banquet intercut with a (sympathetic) suicide bomber's mission delivers Syriana to its predictably ironic climax, suggesting an endless cycle of greed, venality, duplicity, retribution and occasional nobility.
And I could barely manage a shrug. Because I expected so much from Syriana's vast potential, my disappointment is proportionately greater.
Syriana thinks big thoughts. It may even be Oscar bait and reel in some statuettes. But it never gets your heart on its ambitious hook.