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 Are we
as an audience, and are film reviewers as a class, so naïve to
believe that Syriana is a film whose purpose is to tell us
what we already know about a world that is about to fall apart? The
film follows four interwoven stories which finally come together in
the end, with the reminder that everything is connected. For me the
innocence behind the film makes it fall flat. More importantly, the
four stories are old hat for anyone who keeps in touch with the
world. It is here that Hollywood’s lack of sophistication about the
world comes into play. Big oil is essentially evil and greedy, they
tell us. The oil rich countries in the Middle East are corrupt, in
concert with big oil, and even greedier. Oil sheikdoms are equally
corrupt, elitists in their own way. That they work with oil
companies and Western governments against their own is no secret. In
the CIA, nice guys -- and that is a stretch -- finish last, and,
finally, everyone in that secret agency has the morals of a cobra.
 The movie wants us to believe it does not take much to turn young
disillusioned Muslims, seemingly defeated morally and economically
by the West, into terrorist-suicide bombers in just a few short
scenes. I should note that this evolution of a pair of well-fed
looking suicide bombers is the weakest part of the movie. I never
thought the young
men portrayed in these sequences were truly desperate. They did not
seem to have an overwhelming desire for revenge against the West –
meaning big oil, the arbiter of their earthly fate -- and more
pointedly, America and all it represents. These well-fed young men
became terrorists too quickly without enough motivation.
The writer/director Stephen Gaghan won the best screenplay Academy
Award for Traffic, a stunning look at how drugs, from inception to
execution, affect everyone’s lives. In Syriana, Gaghan used
the same separate yet interlocking, story method as he did in
Traffic. It worked better in Traffic because of the overwhelming
ugliness of the story he was telling. Traffic touched on a world
usually hidden from the world most people know. That was a major
reason for its success. In the movie Traffic, the story also moved
at a rapid pace, but not nearly the pace of the wonderful and
unpretentious television series of the same name on which they based
the film. In that series, the interlocking stories, and the pure
grittiness of its design made me feel that I was a part of wherever
the storyteller took me. The drug problem is as bad as it ever was.
Now is the time to revive Traffic because a new audience awaits the
brilliance of that film. Syriana is another story.
 Well-crafted
by Gaghan, and well-edited by Tim Squyres, shot in bold colors by
director of photography Robert Elswit in at times deep contrast with
broad vistas to match, Syriana remains what the director would like
you to think, despite three major explosions, only a political
thriller. As such, the characters sometimes talk too much and say
too little. It is as if Hollywood through Syriana –is finally awake
to the real world, but at 127 minutes it is far too long, even
though it is a movie and not real life. The original score by
Alexandre Deplat also does its required job by leaving little doubt
where we are in the story and where we are about to go in each
succeeding scene.
As with many Hollywood films, technically it was nearly perfect. For
the most part, brilliantly directed, wonderfully filmed, and mostly,
very nicely acted, yet the film fails because it is one-dimensional.
It’s large cast includes a morose CIA agent played by a heavyset
George Clooney. Jeffrey Wright is a sometime morally conflicted
lawyer who acts very much within himself. Matt Damon plays, well,
Matt Damon, as an ambitious oil broker and advisor to a Gulf state
oil prince who dreams of liberalizing his state. Others in the cast
such as Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper, Amanda Peet and Robert
Foxworth acquit themselves well in parts that sometimes verge on
cartoons.
 Syriana
as a movie is something of an unsettling fraud because it belittles
the obvious. It is unsettling because, though it is mostly accurate,
nothing in it is new. It is a fraud, because it dazzles us with
technique, a way to hide its intellectual flaws. The director wants
us to believe he has only just discovered that America is under
assault from forces we don’t understand now, and probably never
will, that our values have a long way to go before nirvana, and that
our vision for, and of the world is flawed. The creators of this
film wrap it with high priority publicity that says wake up America,
reminding us there is little time left to succeed because the myriad
influences out to get us are breathing down our throats. They are
about to wipe us out if we are not careful, if we are not always on
our guard. That message is not new, nor profound.
Visit the movie's official Web site at:
http://syrianamovie.warnerbros.com/
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At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
