a review by J. Robert Parks
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Director – Stephen Gaghan
Writer – Stephen Gaghan, suggested by the book “See No Evil” by Robert Bae
Director of photography – Robert Elswit
Editor – Tim Squyres
Music – Alexandre Desplat
Production designer – Dan Weil
Producer – Jennifer Fox, Michael Nozik and Georgia Kacandes
Released by Warner Brothers Pictures.
122 minutes. Rated R for some graphically violent scenes and occasional obscenity.
STARRING: George Clooney (Bob Barnes), Matt Damon (Bryan Woodman), Jeffrey Wright (Bennett Holiday), Chris Cooper (Jimmy Pope), William Hurt (Stan Goff), Mazhar Munir (Wasim Ahmed Khan), Tim Blake Nelson (Danny Dalton), Amanda Peet (Julie Woodman), Christopher Plummer (Dean Whiting), William C. Mitchell (Bennett Holiday Sr.), Shahid Ahmed (Saleem Ahmed Khan) and Alexander Siddig (Prince Nasir Al-Subaai).
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The straight-forward political thriller is a largely forgotten genre in Hollywood, though it makes brief appearances whenever the country grows particularly cynical about its leaders. Given the current climate, it’s no surprise that Hollywood thinks the time is right for a resurgence.
Syriana is written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who burst into the spotlight when he wrote the screenplay for Traffic. Like that film, Syriana features a large cast of characters who are all connected by a commodity. In that case, it was drugs; in Syriana, it’s oil. So we have the big businessmen (Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, and Tim Blake Nelson, among others), the Saudi princes (Alexander Siddig and Akbar Kurtha), the energy analyst (Matt Damon) and his doting wife (Amanda Peet), the lawyer investigating a huge merger (Jeffrey Wright), and a CIA agent based in the Middle East (George Clooney). Clooney provides the narrative, if not moral, center of the film, which makes sense given that the movie is “suggested” by a former CIA agent’s tell-all book.
Of Syriana‘s many pleasures, the finest is how smart a thriller it is. For the first hour, it’s genuinely not clear how the various characters are connected: exactly who Jeffrey Wright is investigating, or what Clooney is doing in Tehran and Beirut, or how Matt Damon’s visits to Saudi Arabia impact on Christopher Plummer’s wheeling and dealing. It’s so refreshing to have a movie that assumes its audience can keep up with the various storylines and doesn’t mind if we’re in the dark for a while. Syriana is also a film with big ideas, taking the timely topic of Politics and Big Oil and imagining what goes on behind the scenes. How is our government attempting to influence the Saudi royal succession? How are various oil companies working with legitimate and not-so-legitimate foreign governments? Even if our president and vice president weren’t former oil men, would the U.S. actually be able to do anything about the influence of huge multi-national energy companies? It’s not a question of ideology, it’s a question of money. Conservatives who have pre-emptively accused the movie of being anti-Bush have missed the point (Clooney’s other fall film, Good Night and Good Luck, has a much more obvious agenda). Gaghan, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any conclusions and sometimes skims a bit too lightly on the surface, but just raising the issues is likely to get audiences thinking.
The film’s only mis-steps are when it tries to integrate personal storylines with its political themes. Matt Damon’s family life, Jeffrey Wright’s alcoholic father, George Clooney’s unhappy teenage son, and two Pakistani immigrants to Saudi Arabia (who are so clearly doomed to become suicide bombers that their narrative feels foreordained) don’t mesh well with the political machinations. In that respect, Syriana echoes Three Days of the Condor, an almost perfect film that’s marred by a ridiculous romance between Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. Fortunately, it also shares that film’s strong acting, sharp pacing, and ominous tone of paranoia. Readers should note that Syriana is rated R for a particularly graphic torture scene.