movie review: Syriana.

Published in The Post-Star (G7)
1/5/06

Syriana 2005. Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, based on the book by Robert Baer. Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Kayvan Novak, Amr Waked, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, and others. 126 minutes. Rated R for violence and language.

When the waiter at Reel Meals handed us our bill as the credits for "Syriana" began rolling, he asked, "Does everything make sense?"

"No," I said, still trying to digest the plot of the political thriller we'd just watched.

He meant the bill, not the movie, but he said a lot of people were confused by "Syriana."
The movie is one of those films you want to see more than once because its tangle of subplots makes your head spin -- and because it's good.

The plot is hard to summarize -- it jumps in and out of global scenes like a child skipping rope. A CIA agent (George Clooney) is selling missiles in a back room in Tehran; an energy broker (Matt Damon) is eating breakfast with his wife and kids in Geneva; a D.C. lawyer (Jeffrey Wright) is dragging his drunk father out of a bar. Add a couple of squabbling Saudi princes, a room full of eager oil executives discussing a merger, and something about Kazakhstan. Confused yet?

Writer/director Stephen Gaghan (best known for "Traffic") leaves no room for confusion about the movie's message, however. As the tagline claims, "Everything is connected." The complexities of globalization have made it nearly impossible for one good guy to make a difference in the world -- in fact, it has become nearly impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad. "Everything is tainted" might as well have been the tagline.

Clooney, as an increasingly disillusioned CIA operative in the Middle East, delivers a brilliant performance. He is the character that viewers identify with most, since he gives voice to our essential question as the plot thickens: "What is going on?"

What's going on, essentially, is oil. Gaghan wants viewers to see how the issue of access to this dwindling resource -- and the money it represents -- is seeping into global business and politics at all levels, like poison, and is affecting the most innocent of bystanders.

The film has another message, too, and it's a deeply unsettling one. One of the subplots involves a couple of young Arab men who lose their jobs to the U.S. oil industry. They join an Islamic school, drawn in at first by the free food, then intrigued by the charisma of the fundamentalist cleric. Watching their progress, you know what's bound to happen, even as you hope to be wrong.

In the end, the lives of these impoverished teens have just as much -- or more -- impact on the world as the best-trained intelligence agents of the United States.

Gaghan's anger is contagious, but he takes cynicism to the extreme. Let's all hope that "Syriana" is more like Scrooge's visit from the ghost of Christmas future than a glimpse of present-day reality. Just in case, though, you might want to consider a hybrid car.