Syriana
USA Release 11.23.05 limited / 12.9.05 wide
DVD release June 20, 2006
This page includes only selected reviews. A video of Ebert & Roeper's rave review of Syriana is on the video page. You can read more excellent reviews at Metacritic and RT.
- --> Photos
- --> Screencaps
- --> Dec. 2, 2005, Entertainment Weekly, Hollywood Pulls the Trigger
- --> December 19, 2005, Variety, Stephen Gaghan, Syriana
- --> Dec. 9, 2005, Chicago Sun Times (Roger Ebert), Don't even try to understand 'Syriana'
- --> Dec. 8, 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 'Syriana' weaves an intricate web of intrigue
- --> Dec. 8, 2005, Canadian Jewish News, Syriana, set in the Mideast, is a top-notch thriller
- --> Dec. 8, 2005, Connecticut Post, Visit to 'Syriana' reveals too many plotlines
- --> Dec. 8, 2005, East Vally Tribune, 'Syriana' puts a slippery, cold spin on the oil business
- --> Dec. 8, 2005, The New Republic, Middle East, Middle West
- --> Nov. 28, 2005, The New Yorker, Company Man, “Syriana.”
- --> Nov. 23, 2005, Toronto Sun, Clooney's Mideast thriller sizzles
- --> Nov. 23, 2005, New York Times,'Syriana'Clooney and a Maze of Collusion
- --> Nov. 23, 2005, Slate, Just Desert
- --> Nov. 21, 2005, Associated Press, ‘Syriana’ runs on a full tank of ideas
- --> Nov. 21, 2005, Fox News, Clooney's New Movie: 'Fahrenheit 411'
- --> Nov. 17, 2005, Rolling Stone, Syriana
- --> Nov. 17, 2005, Maclean's, Clooney to the rescue
- --> Nov. 17, 2005, Aintitcoolnews, Moriarty Interviews Stephen Gaghan About SYRIANA!!
- --> June 24, 2005, Aintitcoolnews, Morvern sends in his thoughts on the SYRIANA test screening with Clooney, Damon, Wright & Plummer!
- --> March 13, 2005, NY Daily News, A 'World' of buzz in '05
- --> Sept. 17, 2004, The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore looks up and finds ... that things are looking up
- --> Sept. 8, 2004, The Baltimore Sun, Styled just so: food for a flick
Photos, misc. scans
   
Thanks to Warner Bros. for providing the above 2 photos in hi-res.
|
|
Screencaps
|
|
Warner Bros. production notes on Christopher Plummer's role:
"Christopher Plummer / Dean Whiting: Head of the Sloan Whiting law firm that Sydney Hewitt and Bennett Holiday work for. Member of the CLI.".... "Dean Whiting (CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER), Bennett’s boss, the head of Sloan Whiting and one of the most powerful men in Washington, is trying to undo Nasir’s deal with the Chinese. He knows that Nasir’s younger, more callow brother, Prince Meshal (AKBAR KURTHA), will be more amenable to American business interests and he pressures the aging Emir to choose his younger son to succeed him, effectively engineering Nasir’s political demise.". Movie summary (Warner Bros.):
|
December 2, 2005 Entertainment Weekly
Hollywood Pulls the Trigger
December 19, 2005 Variety by Jack Egan
Stephen Gaghan
Syriana
DISTRIB/RELEASE DATE: Warner Bros., Nov. 23
CATEGORY: adapted, from the book "See No Evil," by Robert Baer
STORYLINE: Pic is an intricately plotted geopolitical thriller about the post-9/11 world. Petroleum potentates, oil barons, Islamic terrorists, intelligence operatives and oleaginous Washington lobbyists and legislators ruthlessly pursue power at each other's expense. Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), the ruler of a Persian Gulf petro-kingdom, is switching allegiance from U.S. business interests to the Chinese, who have outbid a big Texas oil company for natural gas drilling rights. Veteran CIA operative Bob Barnes (George Clooney) gets a final assignment -- to assassinate the prince. The plot goes awry, cueing intrigue and upheaval.
ABOUT THE SCRIPT: Gaghan took two years to write the screenplay, notable for its ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy. With more than 100 speaking roles, the screenwriter tried to be punctilious in making every line pitch-perfect. "I wanted to be sure the characters talked just like their equivalents in the real world," says Gaghan, "so I ran the script by all kinds of insiders that helped me catch the proper phrasing." A squad of translators was hired to make sure the Arabic spoken by many actors (and taught to them, since a number are Americans) and, in the case of Clooney, Iranian Farsi, was impeccably idiomatic, and that the subtitles were equally accurate.
BREAKTHROUGH IDEA: The incubation for "Syriana" came when Gaghan did the screenplay for "Traffic" (2000), about the global narcotics business, which spawned the thought that oil was the world economy's crack cocaine. Subsequently reading the book by Baer, he came across an incident recounting how a businessman made a $300,000 contribution to President Clinton and got to have his picture taken with him, which he subsequently used to good advantage. "Suddenly it all fell into place for me," Gaghan recalls. "The influence peddling and the idea that anything in the world can be bought."
BIGGEST CHALLENGE: Weeding out nonessentials. "Juggling multiple and separate stories stretching across so many parts of the world, I had to be brutal, excising anything unnecessary in order to keep the plot moving forward."
FAVORITE SCENE: Wily Washington powerbroker Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), scorned as a mere "cat's paw" in a meeting with Prince Nasir's devious younger brother (Akbar Kurtha), deftly goes for the jugular.
CHOICE LINES: "So, Prince, tell me what you want, are you a king?" (Plummer's retort to the younger prince)
WRITER'S BIO: Gaghan's script for "Traffic" landed him the 2001 Oscar for adapted screenplay and numerous other awards. He won an Emmy in 1997 for his writing for "NYPD Blue." "Syriana" is the second movie helmed by Gaghan, 40, a native of Louisville, Ky., after 2002's "Abandon."
Date in print: Mon., Dec. 19, 2005
December 9, 2005 Chicago Sun Times by Roger Ebert
Don't even try to understand 'Syriana'
Just let this fantastic movie wash over you
"SYRIANA"
Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan. Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Mazhar Munir, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet, Christopher Plummer. Running time: 126 minutes. Rated: R (for violence and language). [Photo: Warner Bros. George Clooney is a veteran CIA field agent in "Syriana," opening tomorrow.]
"Syriana" is an endlessly fascinating movie about oil and money, America and China, traders and spies, the Persian Gulf states and Texas, reform and revenge, bribery and betrayal. Its interlocking stories come down to one thing: There is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some people rich and others dead. The movie seems to take sides, but take a step back and look again. It finds all of the players in the oil game corrupt and compromised, and even provides a brilliant speech in defense of corruption by a Texas oil man (Tim Blake Nelson). This isn't about Left and Right but about Have and Have Not.
The movie begins with one of the Gulf states signing a deal to supply its oil to China. This comes as a strategic defeat for Connex, a Texas-based oil company. At the same time, an obscure oil company named Killen signs a deal to drill for oil in Kazakhstan. Connex announces a merger with Killen, to get its hands on the oil, but the merger inspires a Justice Department investigation, and ...
Let's stop right there. The movie's plot is so complex we're not really supposed to follow it; we're supposed to be surrounded by it. Since none of the characters understands the whole picture, why should we? If the movie shook down into good guys and bad guys, we'd be the good guys, of course. Or if it was a critique of American policy, we might be the bad guys. But what if everybody is a bad guy because good guys don't even suit up to play this game? What if a CIA agent brings about two assassinations and tries to prevent another one, and is never sure precisely whose policies he is really carrying out?
What if ... well, here's a possibility the movie doesn't make explicit, but let me try it out on you. There is a moment when a veteran Washington oil analyst points out that while Kazakhstan has a lot of oil, none of it is where Killen has drilling rights. Yet Killen is undoubtedly shipping oil. Is it possible the Chinese are buying oil in the Gulf, shipping it to Kazakhstan, and selling it to the U.S. through Killen?
I bring up that possibility because I want to suggest the movie's amoral complexity without spoiling its surprises. "Syriana" is a movie that suggests Congress can hold endless hearings about oil company profits and never discover the answer to anything, because the real story is so labyrinthine that no one -- not oil company executives, not Arab princes, not CIA spies, not traders in Geneva -- understands the whole picture.
The movie has a lot of important roles and uses recognizable actors to help us keep everything straight. Even then, the studio e-mailed critics a helpful guide to the characters. I didn't look at it. Didn't want to. I liked the way I experienced the film: I couldn't explain the story, but I never felt lost in it. I understood who, what, when, where and why, but not how they connected. That was how I wanted to relate to it. It created sympathy for individual characters in their specific situations without dictating what I was supposed to think about the big picture.
Some of the characters I cared about included Robert Barnes (George Clooney), a veteran CIA field agent; Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), a trader based in Geneva; Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper), who runs Killen; Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), a well-connected Washington lawyer whose firm is hired to handle the political implications of the merger; Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), assigned by Whiting to do "due diligence" on the deal, by which is meant that diligence that supports the merger; Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who sold the rights to the Chinese; his younger brother Prince Meshal (Akbar Kurtha), who is backed by those who do not want Nasir to inherit the throne; and the mysterious Stan, played by William Hurt as someone who is keeping a secret from the rest of the movie.
Already I regret listing all of these names. You now have little tic-tac-toe designs on your eyeballs. "Syriana" is exciting, fascinating, absorbing, diabolical and really quite brilliant, but I'm afraid it inspires reviews that are not helpful. The more you describe it, the more you miss the point. It is not a linear progression from problem to solution. It is all problem. The audience enjoys the process, not the progress. We're like athletes who get so wrapped up in the game we forget about the score.
A recent blog item coined a term like "hyperlink movie" to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I've lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another. "Syriana" was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for "Traffic," another hyperlink movie. A lot of Altman films like "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" use the technique. Also, recently, "Crash" and "Nine Lives."
In a hyperlink movie, the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one. Consider the Matt Damon character. His family is invited to a party at the luxurious Spanish villa of the Gulf oil sheik whose sons are Nasir and Meshal. At the party, Damon's son dies by accident. The sheik awards Damon's firm a $100 million contract. "How much for my other son?" he asks. This is a brutal line of dialogue, and creates a moment trembling with tension. Later, Damon's wife (Amanda Peet) accuses him of trading on the life of his son. Well, he did take the deal. Should he have turned it down because his son died in an accident? What are Damon's real motives, anyway?
I think "Syriana" is a great film. I am unable to make my reasons clear without resorting to meaningless generalizations. Individual scenes have fierce focus and power, but the film's overall drift stands apart from them. It seems to imply that these sorts of scenes occur, and always have and always will. The movie explains the politics of oil by telling us to stop seeking an explanation. Just look at the behavior. In the short run, you can see who wants oil and how they're trying to get it. In the long run, we're out of oil.
December 8, 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution By Eleanor Ringel Gillespie
'Syriana' weaves an intricate web of intrigue
------------------------------------
'Syriana'
A-
The verdict: Cynical, explosive and smart, smart, smart.
Director: Stephen Gaghan
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet, Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson
Run time: 123 minutes
Release date: Nov. 23, 2005
Rating: R for violence and language.
------------------------------------
The Oscar race gets serious with "Syriana," a gripping and daringly complex movie about How Things Get Done these days in the blood-drenched world of oil, politics and religion.
The producer is George Clooney (who also co-stars), and this film, coupled with "Good Night and Good Luck" (which he directed), makes him Hollywood's undisputed standard bearer for liberal causes and themes. And Clooney doesn't wait for an awards-show pulpit; he's figured out how to make important movies to make his views known.
"Syriana" weaves an intricate web of political intrigue and international economics that spans three continents and at least four story lines.
In one, Clooney lets his hair go grizzled, grows a beard and puts on a Method gut straight out of the De Niro playbook. He plays Bob Barnes, a 21-year CIA veteran whose experience and expertise are a liability in a brave new world of watch-your-back management. "You just don't get it," a colleague says when Barnes reports an agency-sponsored weapons exchange gone bad. "Nobody wants to hear about a missing missile."
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), a telegenic energy analyst, makes a very personal blood-for-oil exchange. He's hired by Kazakhstan's progressive but pragmatic Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who feels guilty about a tragedy that struck the Woodman family. Bryan's wife (Amanda Peet) is horrified.
Back in the U.S.A., spiffy D.C. lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) finds himself in an ethical dilemma when he's asked to shepherd a shady merger between two oil companies past government watchdogs.
Finally, there's Wasim Khan (Mazhar Munir), a charming but rootless young Pakistani. A victim of the merger's ripple effect, he finds himself jobless, penniless, disenfranchised — and a prime target for a smoothie recruiting suicide bombers.
Get ready to get lost at some point in "Syriana." That's how dense the film's maze of plot twists and layers of characters are. But rest assured: The movie was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for his similarly intertwined script for "Traffic." You may not be with him every step of the way, but he makes sure you're up to speed when the crucial down-and-dirty realpolitiks go down and the dicier character choices are made.
"Syriana" is even a better film than "Traffic," which used the drug trade the way this picture uses the bubbling crude crisis. Gaghan eschews the color-coded showiness of the earlier film, and there's none of the overemoting that marred the plot about Michael Douglas and his addict daughter.
Rather, Gaghan often leaves it to the actors to make his points, and his ensemble cast never strikes a false note. In a role that could put him in contention for best supporting actor, Christopher Plummer is splendid, giving us the silken egocentricity and plummy arrogance of a Beltway insider ("In this town, you're innocent until investigated," he likes to say.)
As a wily Ted Turner-ish oil maverick, Chris Cooper is part frontiersman, part corporate wild card — Davy Crockett with an impressive portfolio.
Siddig, who has the presence of a young Omar Sharif, and Akbar Kurtha, as his wastrel I'll-take-the redhead-and-both-blondes brother, are utterly convincing as siblings on very different roads.
Damon's boyish likability is put to insidious use while Wright is credibly tempted by the cigars and brandy of Washington's inner circle. And Clooney, bless him, doesn't let his tummy do all the acting. There's a seen-it-all weariness in his eyes, a ragged honor in his refusal to play by the new rules.
Yet beneath the socio-political-economic gamesmanship, "Syriana" is also a story of fathers and sons. Damon and his delightful little boy. Clooney and his disillusioned college-age son. Siddig and Kurtha, both jockeying for their father's blessing — and crown.
Wright leaves the seductive corridors of power to find his elderly alcoholic dad (William C. Mitchell) sitting on the doorstep of his swank Georgetown residence, a reminder of a past he'd rather leave behind. And Munir succumbs to false promises of "paradise" as his aged father makes do with the same raw deal he's gotten for decades (and, by implication, centuries).
The sins of the fathers are indeed visited upon the sons in "Syriana." And vice versa. No matter how sophisticated our technology, our weapons or our manipulation of images and ethics, we are all reduced to the same ancient blood feuds, the same tainted dreams of power, the same tattered hopefulness.
In "Syriana's" reality — where a butterfly flaps its wings in China and, across the ocean, all the President's men are almost toppled — the code is clear: Do unto others before they can do unto you.
December 8, 2005 The Canadian Jewish News by Sheldon Kirshner
Syriana, set in the Mideast, is a top-notch thriller
Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana brims with virtually all the mandatory ingredients of an early 21st century top-notch political thriller – foreign intrigue, the spectre of terrorism, the illegal arms trade, a bitter family rivalry in a mythical oil-rich Arab nation, a targeted assassination and a sea-borne suicide attack.
Who could ask for anything more?
Now playing in local theatres, Syriana is set in the Middle East, Europe and the United States and has a running time of 122 minutes. And because so many of its characters speak Arabic, be prepared to wade through a lot of English subtitles.
The film – which stars George Clooney as a jaded American intelligence agent dispatched to Beirut on a dangerous mission and Matt Damon as a cynical Geneva-based energy analyst quick to exploit his son’s drowning for economic advantage – addresses some current Mideast issues.
One theme, the fluctuating price of oil – a perennial conversation starter – is fleshed out when two competing U.S. conglomerates merge. The underlying message is that consumers may not necessarily benefit from this cozy arrangement. Christopher Plummer and William Mitchell are exceptionally fine as the chief executive officers whose chicanery knows no bounds.
Another theme in Syriana, based on the memoirs of former CIA operative Robert Baer, turns on the scramble for influence in the Arab world.
The United States and China, an emerging superpower, both covet the oil fields of a Persian Gulf emirate where two ambitious brothers are locked in a vicious power struggle. The first brother favours the status quo. The second, a modernizer, dreams of liberating women from the shackles of Islamic tradition and bringing democracy to his desert kingdom.
There are also passing references to Iran and Hezbollah, but for a change, Israel is completely left out of the picture.
A sub-plot revolves around an embittered Pakistani oil worker who is laid off from his job and turns to radical Islam for succour. An imam brainwashes him in the hope of recruiting him as a suicide bomber.
Clooney, bearded, somewhat paunchy and exceedingly soft-spoken, is Bob Barnes, a world-weary, Farsi-speaking spy who has absolutely no talent for self-promotion, even when coached.
At one point, Barnes fights for his life as a Hezbollah torturer pulls out his nails to extract a vital bit of information. Clooney plays Barnes with imperturbable detachment.
Damon is convincing, too, as is Alexander Siddig, who portrays an Arab prince eager to improve the lives of his people.
Syriana, though murky and meandering in spots, is a bracing movie about an extremely important corner of the world
December 8, 2005 Connecticut Post by Joe Meyers jmeyers@ctpost.com
Visit to 'Syriana' reveals too many plotlines
Judging by the strong reviews that "Syriana" received when it opened in New York and Los Angeles two weeks ago, the "important" subject matter and excellent cast made it unnecessary for the filmmakers to come up with a lucid plot. Critics have hinted that "Syriana" is often incoherent, but the fact that writer-director Stephen Gaghan is tackling the thorny issue of the international oil trade seems to have been enough to garner rave reviews from most of the movie press.
Buried deep in New York Magazine critic Ken Tucker's extremely positive review is a clue to his real feelings upon exiting a press screening: "If at times the complexity of the plot — which I don't claim to have completely followed on just one viewing — threatens to overwhelm viewers, the extra exertion becomes part of the pleasure."
But is it really a "pleasure" to give a movie "extra exertion" and still not "follow" it?
Why should you have to see a movie more than once to get it?
New York Times critic A.O. Scott loved "Syriana," too, but admitted, "you may sometimes wish for a chart diagramming all the patterns of influence, connection and coincidence."
I have a hunch that after the picture opens wide on Friday in multiplexes all over the country, moviegoers will be so frustrated by the jagged storytelling that word of mouth will be largely negative.
I love complex films that reward a second or third viewing, but "Syriana" devolves into such a messy narrative that I was annoyed, rather than intrigued, when I left the theater.
Gaghan was the writer of the multiple Oscar-winning 2000 expos "Traffic," which juggled multiple parallel plot lines to give us an overview of the contemporary drug trade.
Perhaps Gaghan is a better writer than director. Without "Traffic" director Steven Soderbergh at the helm of "Syriana," Gaghan simply piled on too many characters and too many parallel storylines for one feature-length film.
There were times during "Syriana" when it felt like the two-hour-and-15-minute movie had been hastily edited down from a four- or six-hour miniseries.
One plot thread follows Matt Damon as an energy analyst, living in Europe, who becomes involved in a political struggle in a fictional Middle Eastern country.
Another strand deals with George Clooney as a burned-out CIA agent who is clearly getting tired of all of the double dealing he has done on behalf of our government (and its business interests).
The wonderful stage and film actor Jeffrey Wright is featured in a third narrative as a Washington lawyer who is involved in a complex merger between two American oil companies.
As if these three intersecting stories were not enough for a movie, Gaghan adds on a fourth, and largely separate, narrative: the struggles of a desperately poor Pakistani migrant laborer (Mazhar Munir) who is eventually recruited to become a suicide-bomber terrorist.
With all of these characters and exotic settings and contemporary political ideas pulsating madly, "Syriana" is never boring, but as it proceeds, you can't help but wish that Gaghan had stuck to one or two major narrative strands.
The casting is the movie's strongest element. In addition to the stars in the leading roles, the ensemble is packed with talent.
That sly old pro Christopher Plummer shines in several scenes as a cynical Washington power broker. Stage veteran Jayne Atkinson also brings great authority and flashes of dark humor to her all-too-brief appearance as the CIA official who oversees the Clooney character.
"Syriana" has been gorgeously shot and edited for maximum emotional power, but it shoots you from one scene to another just when you would like to dig a little deeper into a single dilemma or idea.
There is a TV-movie banality to Gaghan's decision to add family problems to a couple of the plots: Damon's attempt to stay married to Amanda Peet and Wright's efforts to establish a relationship with his alcoholic and personally derisive father.
Somehow, when a movie shows us the CIA planning to assassinate people — and U.S. businessmen are depicted as being even lower than the government on the moral spectrum — it's hard to care about Damon's family life or whether or not Wright's father will give him a hug.
Two stars (Fair) Rated: R (contains torture sequence)
Opens Friday at Bethel Cinemas; Showcase Cinemas, Bridgeport; Loews Danbury; Criterion Cinemas, New Haven; Crown Royale, Norwalk; Crown Majestic, Stamford; Regal Cinemas, Stratford; and Crown Marquis, Trumbull.
December 8, 2005 East Vally Tribune by Craig Outhier
'Syriana' puts a slippery, cold spin on the oil business
When we last saw Stephen Gaghan, he was taking home a well-deserved best screenplay Oscar for condensing a months-long British miniseries into the relatively tidy drug saga that was “Traffic” (2000).
With “Syriana,” the writer and director has created a similar sort of sprawling, multinarrative civics lesson, this time set in the world of global oil.
Gaghan's feel-good thesis: That oil controls everything, corrupts everything and will likely doom us all. It's the reason burnt-out CIA operative Bob Barnes (George Clooney, playing a loose approximation of real-life spook Robert Baer) is dispatched to the Middle East to assassinate an Arab sheik (an elegantly reserved Alexander Siddig) who wants to pipe oil to China.
It's also the reason corporate lawyer Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright from “Broken Flowers”) finds himself poking around a high-profile petroleum merger, looking for a patsy to throw under the wheels of a congressional investigation. Christopher Plummer (“The Insider”) gives another one of his superlative supporting performances as Holiday's boss, a smooth reptilian enabler who uses his influence to reorganize the petroleum food chain.
Gaghan lets the relationships and motivations of his characters unfold under their own momentum, in a way that seems vague and evasive, at least initially. It's less bad exposition than no exposition at all.
Consequently, we find ourselves trying to keep pace with the story rather than losing ourselves in it, and “Syriana” — while beautifully challenging — tends to feel cold emotionally.
Matt Damon (“The Bourne Identity”) provides a spark of warmth and idealism as a bereaved energy analyst who forms an unlikely alliance with Siddig's embattled prince, and Gaghan includes a moderately insightful subplot involving radicalized Muslim youth that — like many of the threads in "Syriana" — could have used some beefing up.
There's also a troubling alarmist tic in “Syriana” that Gaghan seems unwilling or incapable of suppressing, as if repeat viewings of “JFK” had permanently altered his filmmaking DNA. The U.S. intelligence community comes off as fantastically murderous, and the movie has too much grandiose speechifying, including the expected “greed is good” harangue delivered by a weaselly lawmaker (Tim Blake Nelson): “Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why we win.”
Even in a movie about oil, it all seems a bit crude.
December 8, 2005 The New Republic by Stanley Kauffmann
STANLEY KAUFFMANN ON FILMS
Middle East, Middle West
Post date 12.08.05 | Issue date 12.19.05
Oil. The word recurred constantly in stories about the Middle East when the Iraq war began. Twice I saw television hosts impatiently brush away the subject of oil when guest experts mentioned it, as if it were too banal a topic, too frequently used to explain military and political moves in the region. Lately, however, oil seems to have receded in Middle East reportage and discussion. Now here is Syriana, which takes place in several Arab countries (along with other places) and has a thick plot whose text and subtext are oil. Iraq is never mentioned, but it is there. Apparently the film leaves it to the viewer's assumption that any story about oil in this region must implicate Iraq.
Syriana was written--and directed--by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote the very substantial Traffic five years ago. (Syriana, we've been told, is a term that was coined to tag the Middle East countries as a group.) The film is based on the memoirs of Robert Baer, a former CIA agent. George Clooney plays such an agent, and the tenor of his experience is established very early. The first sequence is in Tehran where, after conferring with several local men, Clooney walks down the street toward us. About twenty yards behind him a car blows up. Clooney doesn't even turn around; he just keeps on walking calmly.
The story quickly--well, not very quickly--quadruples. Besides the Clooney character, who is a bit worn by grim experience, the film has three other leading persons. Jeffrey Wright plays a Washington lawyer whose firm assigns him to deal with an important merger between two American oil companies. Matt Damon is a financial analyst who lives in Geneva with his family. Through a strange series of events he becomes adviser to an Arab prince eager to succeed his father as emir of an unnamed oil-soaked country. Mazhar Munir plays a Pakistani laborer in an Iranian oil field, living in the warren of a laborers' compound, who in frustration about the way his employers treat him and others turns to radical Islam. One novelty in the screenplay is that these four stories are not eventually connected, as we might expect. What explains their coursing in parallel lines is that, in four different ways, they are all connected with oil.
So there are four principal lines of action. Clooney is given a fresh mission in the Middle East, where he is kidnapped and tortured for information. (An unsparing scene.) He manages to get back to Washington and has reason to confront a hugely powerful figure (Christopher Plummer) whose fingers are in the petroleum pie. Damon finds himself exhorting and scolding his Arab employers for their medieval ways and at the end is accidentally--and unknowingly--involved in an action against Clooney. Wright goes to Texas to deal with a convocation of industry biggies. There and elsewhere--several elsewheres--he carries confidence like a banner. Munir's proletarian is fired by radical Islam in a spiritualized yet more violent version of the way that proletarians of the 1930s were fired by communism.
Numerous other actors provide vivid sketches of Arab and American figures encountered along the route. This multiplicity--of people, stories, settings--is both the weakness and strength of the film. It is not easy to follow all the various threads, to get the pith of every scene. Still, this very abundance gives the whole picture a sense of authority. It pours and pours so much in front of us that we feel the makers of the picture must know what they are talking about.
Part of our receptivity to this picture comes from our hunger for insight about the current war. To repeat: Iraq is never mentioned, but the atmosphere of the picture, its hugger-mugger about oil, seems related in tenor to the current official camouflage about Iraq. Another part of our receptivity comes from the recent rash of dirty dealings at high levels--Enron, etc. No sentient person could ever have imagined that huge corporations were run by saints, but what has happened in the last few years helps us to believe the mutterings and taciturn exchanges among tycoons in this film. None of the doings by American oil men is overtly illegal, but all of them seem sly.
Clooney, bearded and heavy, creates his underwritten role himself with his authenticating presence. Damon continues to rise out of his pleasant American-boy persona into authority. Wright is so forcefully assured as the lawyer that he needs to spend no time in contriving that assurance. Munir is frightening. Plummer is, as always, magnificent.
Alexandre Desplat's score is so effective that, at times, if we wonder why a scene is holding us, we recognize that the music is helping. The general level of cinematography these days has risen so high that it is possible to take Robert Elswit's fine work for granted. Tim Squyres, the editor, must have been one of the busiest people on the planet while he was editing Syriana: he had to keep the complex film speedy without being curt. In general he succeeds. Gaghan, we're told, spent much time in the Arab world while he was writing this picture, and his directing bespeaks familiarity.
At the finish Syriana impresses, not because it is very moving, which it isn't, or because it is crystal clear, which it also isn't, but because it is so large, so encompassing, so seemingly privy to inside stuff--about the way the Middle East is being manipulated behind our backs and over our heads. At the end we feel that we didn't know we wanted this film and are glad that our unconscious wish was granted.
A painful number of films belong, whatever their subject, in the "Why?" genre. Soon after one of them begins, we begin to wonder why it was made. Why did anyone ever think it had any value, intrinsically or commercially? Many a clunky film lies outside this genre because we can see why someone thought--mistakenly--that it had value of some kind. But the "Why?" category is something else. The latest instance is The Ice Harvest.
Reputable people were involved. The co-author of the screenplay, derived from a Scott Phillips novel, was Robert Benton who, from Bonnie and Clyde onward, has been involved in notable pictures. The director was Harold Ramis who made the clever Groundhog Day and the funny Analyze This. The Ice Harvest was apparently meant to be a clever and funny black comedy.
It takes place on Christmas Eve in Wichita, Kansas. A crooked lawyer (John Cusack) steals a couple of million in cash at the start--scanty explanation of how or from whom--but he and his partner (Billy Bob Thornton) cannot drive away with their loot because of an ice storm. Nonetheless, they spend the night driving around Wichita, getting into a lot of tangles, including murder. The whole story smells of feverish manufacture. It includes that boring cliché, the scene in which a couple of men in a nightclub discuss serious business while strippers undulate behind them. It also includes a reminder of the final murder in Prizzi's Honor when a man shoots the woman he is embracing.
Black comedy? Black enough, but they muffed the other word. Robert Benton and Harold Ramis, put on dunce caps and go stand in the corner.
Stanley Kauffmann is TNR's film critic.
November 28, 2005 The New Yorker by David Denby
Company Man
“Syriana.”
“Syriana,” Stephen Gaghan’s tense, outrageously complicated thriller about oil, the C.I.A., and the Middle East, is a major film without being a great film. It’s a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and pessimism connect it (in my mind, at least) to other recent American films in ways that suggest that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies. The picture was inspired by incidents in “See No Evil,” a book published in 2002 by the former field agent Robert Baer. A chatty, entertaining writer, Baer tells raffish stories about the C.I.A. in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, a time when, he claims, the agency was withdrawing the field operatives who might have prevented the September 11th attacks. The movie may also have drawn on a later book by Baer, “Sleeping with the Devil,” in which he complains that the oil companies are subverting the national interest. “Syriana” takes these worries into the present and raises the level of bitterness. In the movie, Bob Barnes (George Clooney), a field agent, is a patriot and a truth-teller, but he is aging and out of shape; his instincts for danger are not as sharp as they used to be. In a C.I.A. devoted to such things as the liberation of Iran (a chimera backed by the Administration and oil-industry movers), Bob’s candor and integrity are seen as beside the point. Like those movie gangsters who try to make one last run before retiring, he leaves Washington for Beirut, his old stomping ground, but betrayal is in the air.
Bob Barnes is set up as a conventional hero—he might be a nobly burdened figure from a le Carré novel—but it quickly appears that he’s no more than a single strand in a very thickly woven plait. Gaghan, the talented screenwriter who pulled together many juicy stories, high and low, in the drug-world narrative “Traffic” (directed by Steven Soderbergh), creates an even more fully articulated structure this time. He’s a Web-era filmmaker—distance is just a form of connection. A captain of industry smiles, and, half a globe away, a hundred people lose their jobs; a C.I.A. technician pushes a button in Washington, and an Arab prince is taken out by a missile in the desert. The main player on this worldwide stage is a rampaging Houston-based oil company, Connex, which has lost its right to drill for natural gas in an oil emirate. In order to keep the gas flowing, Connex is merging with a small Texas company that has bribed its way into gaining similar rights in Kazakhstan. In the emirate, Connex tries to manipulate two Western-educated brothers who are rivals for the throne: Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), a reformer who speaks of a parliament and open markets but wants the American oil companies and military thrown out of his country; and the younger Prince Meshal (Akbar Kurtha), a svelte, boastful schemer who wants them to stay put. For the Americans, the stakes are keeping up gas supplies for the home market and finding new ways of supplying Europe with energy. The reward is power and wealth—a house “on the Vineyard.”
All the parties in the movie—the Arabs, the C.I.A., the Justice Department, the oil companies, the law firm that services the oil companies—want the pipelines running, but the world supply is drying up, and a scramble is on to control what’s left. This tumultuous historical and commercial background operates at full intensity in every scene. What Gaghan offers is not so much a story as a malaise: like the cocaine trade in “Traffic,” oil is the life, the obsession, the only reality. It gets people killed, tortured, blown up, thrown on the junk heap. An ambitious young energy analyst working in Switzerland, Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), loses his young son in a swimming-pool accident at a party the Emir throws in Marbella. Without much hesitation, Woodman parlays this disaster into a lucrative connection with the reforming prince, who, feeling guilty, wants to do the young man a favor. The analyst’s wife (Amanda Peet) is shocked by his opportunism. In a key scene, Damon tries to explain himself, but he can’t quite say what he means—that his veins are buzzing, because he has the chance to become a player—and, not understanding, Peet looks as if she had been kicked in the stomach.
Gaghan cuts off her rage before it comes to a boil. He constructs short, tense scenes that often end abruptly, with a nasty implication hanging in the air. He hops all over the world, and his method makes it impossible to develop anything in depth, though he handles certain physical things, like Hezbollah’s rough way of welcoming guests to Beirut, with masterly violent strokes. His specialty, however, is the décor and style of power—a joshing, slightly menacing bonhomie, with cradled snifters of brandy and mutual flatteries, and then a sudden shift from charm to contemptuous bullying. Christopher Plummer, as an establishment Washington lawyer with C.I.A. connections, gives the kind of suavely insinuating performance that he’s often given before. He’s so good at it that there’s a tendency to take him for granted, but every time Plummer is on the screen in “Syriana” there’s an extra charge of danger and malice. A raft of good actors—Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Gerety—playing self-serving oilmen, demonstrate the kind of blinkered self-assurance that wipes out any contrary view of the world. The wash of ego feels accurate.
Some of the muttered talk among the heavyweights is so knowing and allusive, though, that it’s hell to follow. Gaghan assumes a working knowledge of federal bureaucracies and Middle Eastern history—a rare case of a filmmaker respecting an audience’s intelligence too much. As you watch the movie, with its twenty or so characters, many of them duplicitous, you have to keep reminding yourself who each one is and who he works for. It’s as if you were constantly prepping for a quiz. And there are sketchy and veiled elements, too, such as the mysterious relationship between an ambitious young Washington lawyer (Jeffrey Wright), who represents Connex’s interests, and his alcoholic father, who hangs around his house in a rage. If the father is in mourning because his son has sold out to the big boys, Gaghan should have given us more than a hint. Trying to sum up the corrupt, suffering world in two hours, he has spread himself too thin. It’s good that he leaves the law firms and fancy hotels and takes us down to the polluted oil fields, where he introduces us to two charming young Pakistani men who live in a filthy foreign-workers compound. When the Pakistanis lose their jobs, they fall into the hands of a friendly Egyptian, who brings them to a clean white madrasa, where they are fed lamb and a mesmerizing line of anti-Western rant. But the transformation of the two from carefree fellows to suicide bombers is too quick and summary—it feels as if Gaghan were just filling out a scheme.
Whatever his follies and mistakes, Gaghan is a forceful talent. He has a sharp tongue, moral urgency, and, for a beginning director (this is his second film), an amazingly fluent way with actors. I longed for him to slow down here and there, but he does keep his perilously fragile structure taut—there are no dead spots or hollowly righteous passages. His politics may lean toward left paranoia and Hollywood indignation, but he’s not a bore; he drops his clues and his dire suggestion—that the C.I.A. is an enforcer for the oil companies—and moves on. The oddness of “Syriana” is a result of its form: the many characters take what reality they have solely from their participation in Gaghan’s intricate plan, and some of them get lost. Bob Barnes, for instance, is not the hero of his own movie. Betrayed in Beirut, kidnapped, and tortured (in a terrifying scene), he is then shunted aside by everyone, including, bizarrely, the filmmakers. (In order to play the role, Clooney, bearded and paunchy, has developed a new, abashed style, a look of agonized bewilderment.) In brief, this is an epic movie without a hero or a protagonist—or, rather, the protagonist is the oil business itself, which controls everyone. So much money can be made in oil, the movie says, that no one working in it would be foolish enough to behave ethically.
That perception may be why Gaghan constructed “Syriana” as he did. In narrative forms, heroic stature is achieved by a character working steadily toward a defined goal or struggling to fulfill some ideal of the self. But if good people are considered ineffectual to begin with, or, even worse, a nuisance or irrelevant, then it’s virtually impossible to construct a story around their efforts. In the maze that is “Syriana,” no Theseus arrives to slay the Minotaur, and the absence of a hero reminded me of the maddeningly repetitive, plotless “Jarhead.” In that movie, the superbly trained warriors of the Gulf War never get into the fight. The recent “Lord of War” does have a hero—an arms trader—but he is celebrated ironically, as an irrepressible scoundrel. What’s going on? In the late sixties and early seventies, the futility and the shame of the unwinnable war in Vietnam found their way, as a displaced mood, into movies that had little to do with Vietnam. “Jarhead” and “Syriana” are reflecting a similar mood about the current mess in Iraq. At the moment, mere activity has replaced storytelling, irony has replaced heroism, and the taste of victory has turned to wormwood and gall.
November 23, 2005 Toronto Sun by Bruce Kirkland
Clooney's Mideast thriller sizzles
PLOT: Before it comes together at the tragic climax, you must pay close attention to a complexity of parallel plots involving personal trauma, oil industry corruption, Washington intrigue, spy action and Middle East terrorism.
A gripping thriller, a labyrinth of parallel plots, a moral message movie and a brutally realistic action picture -- Stephen Gaghan's drama Syriana is all that and more.
Although it is one of the best films of 2005, it will be a miracle if it becomes a mainstream success because this kind of movie is not supposed to be comfort food for the masses.
The film is so complex that a bathroom break or a two-minute nap could throw you so off track that you won't know what the hell is going on.
And, in the morally murky world of oil, Congress, the C.I.A., Hezbollah, Arab sheikdoms and the madrassa schools that "educate" Middle East suicide bombers, there is no protagonist to love, respect and root for.
In fact, the most sympathetic characters are two Pakistani Muslims who lose their jobs in the oilfields because of geo-political machinations. Vulnerable, confused and desperate, they are sucked into the fantaticism of a cell of terrorists who train suicide bombers. We see just how easy that process is when the targeted people are disadvantaged.
The next most charismatic figure is an Arab prince (Alexander Siddig from Kingdom Of Heaven) who is considered an enemy of the U.S. because he is a liberal reformer who won't sell out his unnamed country to Big Oil.
As for the many movie stars in the stellar ensemble, George Clooney is fattened up by 30 pounds to play a C.I.A. agent -- hardly a sexy role. Matt Damon looks normal but plays a U.S. financial consultant who uses the accidental death of his own son to leverage a lucrative inside job with the prince. Amanda Peet plays his disgusted wife.
Other key players include Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson and Christopher Plummer, the latter in a beautifully orchestrated performance as a Washington lawyer specializing in the Middle East. His savagery is awe-inspiring -- and distressing because it is so real.
Particular credit also goes to Jeffrey Wright (Angels In America) for his astringent work as an ambitious and manipulative lawyer in Plummer's firm.
is pointless to try to explain how all these pieces interlock in Gaghan's sensational screenplay, which was loosely inspired by See No Evil, the controversial book by former C.I.A. field agent Robert Baer (who is played, in a fictional way, by Clooney). Syriana is even more ambitious and complicated than Gaghan's Oscar-winning script for Traffic, which Steven Soderbergh directed (he is the co-executive producer here with Clooney).
The complexity of the material demands attention. Take mental notes. Even at the end, moral ambiguity is not explained away. There are no heroic, save-the-day Superman stunts to let us feel good about the world.
Instead, we grapple with "the truth" of a dirty, conflicted, warring world in which the powerful exploit the weak. Syriana does not answer your concerns, it asks pointed questions. That is what great art should do.
But that also means this is caustic drama, not easy escapism. It is the counterpoint to Soderbergh/Clooney fluff like Ocean's Eleven and watching Syriana will add stress, not relieve it. I think that is exciting. Still, enter at your own risk.
BOTTOM LINE: Stephen Gaghan's brilliant political thriller is a hugely challenging film for audiences willing to invest in a film with a social conscience. A large ensemble cast led by George Clooney is uniformly terrific.
(This film is rated 14-A)
November 23, 2005 New York Times A.O. Scott
Movie Review | 'Syriana'
Clooney and a Maze of Collusion
Swaddled in 30 extra pounds and a thick gray beard, George Clooney moves through his portion of "Syriana" with furrowed brow and a slow, careful gait. His character, Bob Barnes, is a not-unfamiliar type in the world of movie espionage: the weary, cynical C.I.A. operative on the brink of an attack of conscience. Bob, who has spent his career in cheerful spots like Beirut and Tehran, is the kind of guy who knows a lot more than he says, and who speaks in a low monotone, evading more questions than he answers. When pressed for information - by an aggressive government bureaucrat or by his impatient teenage son (Max Minghella) - his default response seems to be, "It's complicated."
Quite so. "Syriana," written and directed by Stephen Gaghan (who also wrote "Traffic," its obvious precursor), is a movie that demands and rewards close attention. Loosely based on the memoirs of a C.I.A. veteran, Robert Baer, on whom Mr. Clooney's character is modeled, it aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time. Along with Mr. Baer's book "See No Evil," it assimilates a whole shelf of post-9/11 nonfiction and journalism, spinning a complex, intriguing narrative about oil, terrorism, money and power. Parsing its details requires a good deal of concentration: important information is conveyed through whispered conversations and sidelong glances, and you may sometimes wish for a chart diagraming all the patterns of influence, connection and coincidence. But the mental labor of figuring out just what is going on is part of what makes the film such a rich and entertaining experience.
And its sheer entertainment value - the way that Mr. Gaghan, with remarkable conviction and confidence, both honors and scrambles the conventions of the genre - is worth emphasizing. Since it deals with some contentious contemporary realities, it is likely to be greeted with a fair amount of chin-rubbing commentary. Though "Syriana" is expressly a work of fiction, it will no doubt be subjected to a round of pseudo-fact-checking, and its dark, conspiratorial view of the present and recent past is likely to be challenged, either because it is too complicated or not complicated enough.
Someone is sure to complain that the world doesn't really work the way it does in "Syriana": that oil companies, law firms and Middle Eastern regimes are not really engaged in semiclandestine collusion, to control the global oil supply and thus influence the destinies of millions of people. O.K., maybe. Call me naïve - or paranoid, or liberal, or whatever the favored epithet is this week - but I'm inclined to give Mr. Gaghan the benefit of the doubt. And even if the picture's rendering of current events turns out to be entirely off base, the energy, care and intelligence with which it makes its points are hard to dismiss.
There are four main storylines, linked by the anxious, irregular heartbeat of Alexandre Desplat's score - each one subject to enough twists and reversals to make plot summary a treacherous exercise. While Bob is sorting out his midcareer issues - his bosses, concerned about his maverick tendencies, appear to want either to confine him to a desk job or send him off to be killed somewhere - some members of the younger generation are finding troubles and opportunities of their own. Bennet Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is a rising lawyer at a Washington firm who is called upon to run due diligence in advance of a merger between two energy companies. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), a financial analyst living with his family in expatriate luxury in Geneva, becomes the financial adviser to Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), who is eager to succeed his father as ruler of an oil-rich emirate and inaugurate a program of political and economic modernization. In Prince Nasir's country, meanwhile, a young Pakistani laborer named Wasim (Mazhar Munir) succumbs to the lure of radical Islam, seeking refuge from the dusty oil fields and crowded hostels in the tranquillity of a madrasa.
These five characters - Bob, Wasim, Prince Nasir, Bennett and Bryan - add up to a sort of composite hero, though their heroism, collective and individual, is highly ambiguous. Not one of them is in possession of a clear conscience or a singular motive, and not one of them fully claims the audience's sympathy. Greed and ambition sometimes coincide with idealism, and self-interest shades into scruple. Each of the five is afflicted by family problems - the mutual disappointments of fathers and sons is the film's principal psychological motif - and throws himself into the world of money, politics and power as a way to escape or salve his private unhappiness.
Viewed in hindsight, and as a whole, "Syriana" can seem a bit chilly and schematic. Mr. Gaghan handles the main characters with analytical detachment, leaving it to the actors to supply each of them with a full measure of individuality. They prove more than equal to the task, and it is hard to single any one of them out. At different points in the film - and with the repeated viewings it amply repays - you notice Mr. Munir's delicate, watchful sensitivity; Mr. Damon's angry, boyish bravado; Mr. Siddig's icy mastery; or Mr. Wright's stealthy ferocity. Mr. Clooney, an executive producer as well as one of the stars, pushes understatement almost to the point of inscrutability. Is that guilt we see in Bob's eyes, or fatigue? Skepticism or fear?
There are too many fine supporting performances to list, though Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper, Amanda Peet, William C. Mitchell and Shahid Ahmed all deserve mention. A movie this crowded and wide-ranging - the number of speaking parts seems to be exceeded only by the variety of locations - inevitably resorts to various kinds of shorthand. The secondary characters tend to be stock figures. When a character is shown working in his garden and then, later, swirling brandy in a snifter, you know he is a bad guy. A man who shoots billiards in the middle of the day can be counted on to be feckless and self-indulgent, and anyone who makes a high-minded speech on the virtues of free-market capitalism might as well have "fall guy" tattooed on his forehead.
All of which is to say that "Syriana" is, in the end, a movie. Rather than dispense with the familiar signposts of Hollywood storytelling, it brings them to a state of heightened attention and pushes beyond the clichés of heroism and suspense toward something a good deal more unsettling. Something you might even call realism.
"Syriana" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some graphically violent scenes and occasional obscenity.
Syriana
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Stephen Gaghan; written by Mr. Gaghan, suggested by the book "See No Evil" by Robert Baer; director of photography, Robert Elswit; edited by Tim Squyres; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Dan Weil; produced by Jennifer Fox, Michael Nozik and Georgia Kacandes; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 122 minutes.
WITH: 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).
November 23, 2005 Slate By David Edelstein
Just Desert
The murky clarity of Syriana, the transparent jumble of Paradise Now
[Photo: Clooney gets love handles]
Champions of the current administration like to label people who question its rhetoric—who simply raise the possibility that acts of terrorism emanating from the Middle East have as much to do with the U.S.'s historical role in the region as with terrorists' "pure evil" and "hatred of our freedoms"—as "fifth columnists," "traitors," "hate America firsters," "Chomskyites," "Michael Moore-ish conspiracy nuts," etc. Given that climate (which persists even as more and more Americans question the Iraq debacle), it's a bloody miracle to see a movie like Syriana (Warner Bros.) emerge from a major studio. The film, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, is a grim, twisty international conspiracy picture that challenges the audience on every level, political and aesthetic. The aesthetic part is a bit of an obstacle, though. I can't remember a time I had as much trouble—at a movie I admired—just figuring out what the hell was going on.
Gaghan is a tad remiss in giving us our bearings, although George Clooney—who got this film made—gives you some love handles to hold onto. When we meet him, he's making an arms deal with … I'm not sure, actually … but the buyers have been targeted … or is he the one targeted? … No, it's the other guys … Anyway, I know for sure that a car blows up and that Clooney walks away. Well, lurches away. Mostly what you register is that he's bearded, unkempt, and stout (he put on many pounds for the role), and that it must have been fun for such a handsome rogue to transform himself into a burned-out intelligence operative who comes to learn just how expendable to his country he is.
The next scene shows an even more saturnine than usual Christopher Plummer snipping flowers (a symbol for something) while psyching out a muted, bespectacled Jeffrey Wright as some kind of investigator. Plummer—so sleek, so economical, so redolent of malevolent authority—wants Wright to report to him about the machinations behind the merger of two mammoth energy companies to create a corporation with revenues greater than the GDPs of Pakistan and Denmark. In the course of his inquiry, Wright is promised by someone (I'm not sure which company he works for) enough money for a home on Martha's Vineyard if only he … Well, I'm not exactly sure what he's supposed to do. He's the only black man in the boardroom, though, and his old dad registers mute disapproval at his collusion. (I think.) Wright is the unreadable moral center of the film: Will he expose the conspiracy (upbeat ending) or permit it to flourish (downbeat ending)?
The movie's other star, Matt Damon, is a sunny energy analyst (and family man) who sees an opportunity to advise a foundering emirate on the most efficient way to pipe its oil into Europe—and also to find a way to keep from being flattened by the heavy hand of the U.S.'s military-industrial complex. A family tragedy (God, I hate it when kids are killed for shock value) dashes his temperamental optimism, but it's rekindled by his client: a Western-educated prince (Alexander Siddig) with progressive ideals—and a skulking ne'er-do-well idiot trust-funder brother who'd like to maintain the corrupt status quo.
I apologize for this baffled, infelicitous summary, but for me to study the press notes and paint a clearer picture would be shirking my critical responsibility. Gaghan is obviously a student of labyrinthine, polyphonic, stiff-upper-lip British miniseries like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and, of course, Traffic, which he adapted for the American screen. And he's probably right to conclude that linearity isn't the best way to tell the multitentacled story of a shadowy alliance between U.S. intelligence agencies and big oil companies to control the fate—and the oil—of a Mideast kingdom, while simultaneously introducing wingnut profiteers, intense sibling rivalries inside royal families, a suspect committee for "Iranian liberation," murky CIA assassination plots and their attendant double-crosses, and even a pair of apolitical Middle Eastern men who are radicalized by the West's economic exploitation. No, Syriana is meant to sprawl, to misdirect, to disorient; I'm sure that after several viewings one could successfully diagram the conspiracy. It's too bad that Gaghan makes it difficult to distinguish the purposefully jumbled from the inept.
Scene by scene, though, Syriana holds you. Gaghan, a student of Steven Soderbergh, is fond of mucking with the syntax—say, playing the soundtrack of an upcoming meeting over shots of characters hurrying to get to it. The camera is unmoored, the tempo lickety-split, the images poetic and disturbing. A sequence in an arid, inhospitable desert takes on a different kind of meaning with skyscrapers shimmering in the distance. The framing brings out the impotence of the characters we trust. In most paranoid conspiracy thrillers, we learn the frightening truth along with the protagonist; here, there's no central figure to put it all together for us. In some ways we're the protagonist, and when the strands coalesce in the last hour and we glimpse the bigger picture, Syriana finally eats into the mind. The more we learn about How Things Work in the global economy, the more we despair that the rock will ever be lifted and the maggots exposed to sunlight.
[Photo: In the shoes of terrorists]
The two budding terrorists of Syriana—so sketchy as to be merely placeholders for a larger epic—take center stage in Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now (Warner Independent Pictures), which is likely the most humanistic film about suicide bombers ever made. During the last election, Dick Cheney accused Democrats of wanting to "understand" the terrorists, to "give them therapy" instead of fighting them. But if nothing else, the best way to defeat one's enemies is to understand how they think.
Paradise Now centers on two attractive, likable, nonfanatical, even rather secular Palestinian men. The jittery Said (Kais Nashef) has been driven nearly mad by his West Bank confinement and remains haunted by the murder of his father for collaborating with the Israelis. His friend Khaled (Ali Suliman) is less divided. Called upon to do a job and determined to obey, he takes charge of the operation. When the pair become separated and the mission imperiled, it's Khaled's job to track down his buddy and bring him back into the unholy fold.
Unlike Syriana, Paradise Now is not a particularly complex piece of dramaturgy. There is a gorgeous, Western-educated Palestinian woman (Lubna Azabal) who makes the attractive and tidy case for nonviolence—countering the protagonists' assertion that they'll be met in the afterlife by virgins, etc., with the movie's title. What makes this an important film is the way it puts you in that landscape and in those shoes, so that you almost understand how ordinary human beings can be impelled to do inhuman things. It's a powerful rejoinder to a culture in which empathy is painted as the province of traitors... 2:42 p.m. PT
David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at slatemovies@slate.com.
November 21, 2005 Associated Press/MSNBC by David Germain
‘Syriana’ runs on a full tank of ideas
Stephen Gaghan’s intelligent thriller begs for an even longer run time
REVIEW
Writer-director Stephen Gaghan has a full tank of ideas in “Syriana,” a tale of oil-industry corruption and conspiracy whose story is almost too dense and taxing for the average guy at the pumps.
The filmmaker applies the multiple story lines, far-flung locations and detached-observer perspective he used in Steven Soderbergh’s drug drama “Traffic,” whose screenplay earned Gaghan an Academy Award.
The effect may not be as sharp and street-level emotional as “Traffic,” yet “Syriana” weaves powerful moments of pathos, compassion, and cross-cultural insight into its lesson on the realities of greed in international commerce.
Anyone who grouses that Hollywood dumbs everything down should check out “Syriana,” a fiercely intelligent thriller that puts audiences through a challenging mental workout to decipher and digest its intricate ideas and dialogue.
It’s impossible to absorb it all in a single viewing, and so much is packed into such a tight space that “Syriana” occasionally feels too truncated, like a two- or three-night miniseries clipped to fit a movie-of-the-week time slot.
Still, Gaghan injects so much personality into his characters — and the cast led by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper and Amanda Peet embody them so richly — that a great deal of humanity shines through in what otherwise could have been an academic exercise.
As “Traffic” did with drug smugglers and government enforcers, “Syriana” wanders among the shadowy parties that open or tighten the spigots on petroleum running to the refineries, from corporate board rooms to federal agencies to the palaces of Arab royalty.
Anchoring the story is Clooney as CIA career man Bob Barnes, a character inspired by intelligence agent Robert Baer and his memoir “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism” (Clooney and Soderbergh turned Gaghan on to the book, and their production company helped produce the film).
Barnes is a dutiful trooper and supremely competent in often dastardly undercover missions in the Middle East, where he seems more at home than among the Washington political tricksters who pull his strings.
His seen-it-all demeanor is balanced by the naivete of young energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Damon), who takes his wife (Peet) and family along on a trip to pursue a Mideast business opportunity. Woodman forges an unexpected bond with a reformist Arab prince (Alexander Siddig) seeking to put his country on a progressive economic and social footing.
Swirling through this world are the special interests — Cooper as the head of a Texas oil company about to consolidate with a global rival, Wright as an attorney trying to maneuver the merger to federal regulatory approval, and Christopher Plummer as his boss, a slick lawyer manipulating internal Mideast politics to the advantage of U.S. business interests.
Plummer is simply chilling in a relatively small role as a corporate predator who comes bearing a soft smile and a handshake, while William Hurt as a shady Clooney ally and Tim Blake Nelson as an oil-industry sleaze make strong impressions in even more fleeting roles.
Behind a bushy, grizzled beard, Clooney is a gripping presence despite his character’s utter lack of showiness. Clooney plays him as the stoic opposite of his P.T. Barnum ringleader in the “Ocean’s Eleven” movies, a workmanlike believer who goes about his job as a matter of philosophical conviction.
Wright delivers the most well-rounded performance, subtly capturing the inner conflict of a man trying to reconcile personal ambition with distaste for the world in which he thrives.
Gaghan tosses in a couple of seriously undercooked side stories for Clooney and Wright’s characters, family crises that come off as sketchy appendages whose real meat likely ended up on the cutting-room floor.
“Syriana” also shortchanges the story of two Arab friends (Mazhar Munir and Sonell Dadral) disillusioned over Western corporate heartlessness.
Certainly, Gaghan had big choices to make about what to cut and what to leave in. But if Peter Jackson can let “King Kong” run to three hours, isn’t there room to let a movie as smart as “Syriana” run to 2 1/2, thereby gaining in dimension and potency?
Not many movies stand to gain from a longer running time, but “Syriana” is one of them.
Quick facts
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet, Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson
Director: Stephen Gaghan
Run time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
MPAA rating: R
November 21, 2005 Fox News - Fox 411 by Roger Friedman
Clooney's New Movie: 'Fahrenheit 411'
Syriana: Clooney's CIA Movie Is 'Fahrenheit 411'
Basically, in "Syriana," writer/director Stephen Gaghan (the Oscar-winning adapter of "Traffic"), former CIA agent Bob Baer and producers George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have made a thriller for people who read the Financial Times.
It's also a companion piece in many ways to a great movie Clooney starred in several years ago, "Three Kings."
Shot in Morocco and Dubai, "Syriana" may be an eye opener to Westerners who don’t give much thought to world events.
Syriana was screened Friday night at Cinema 2 in New York City, a sort of bunker movie theater in a basement, while upstairs in Cinema 1, Clooney’s "Good Night and Good Luck" was doing sold-out business.
Upstairs: the paying public. Downstairs: as much media elite as could fit in a room, with Robin and Marsha Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Mike Myers, Amy Irving, Nora Ephron, Jason Lewis, Catherine Crier and Lisa Bloom of Court TV, plus lots of editor/writer types and quite a few Academy voters.
ABC News chief David Westin moderated a panel after the screening with Clooney, Gaghan and Baer fielding questions.
It was the first totally finished print, Gaghan told us, completed last Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. The last thing he did was pick the font for the closing credits (it’s from a restaurant in Venice called Axe and pronounced ah-shay).
He started working on the film in 2001 and did a massive amount of travel and research with the help of former CIA agent Baer, upon whose book, "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism," the movie is largely based.
In case you’re interested in this: the CIA has not seen the movie nor approved the script because Baer didn’t write it. They did vet his book, in which you will find many redacted pages with big, black markings covering sensitive material.
"Syriana" is a thriller, but it can be a bit confusing. The basic story is that an oil company has set up shop in the Gulf, just as a merger is going through. The local royal Arab family is in the middle of a succession as the Emir (king) is about to step aside for one of his two sons: an idiot, and a sensitive, forward thinker. Guess who gets the job?
Clooney plays a CIA agent who’s a little over the hill and washed up. But he’s onto the fact that the government and the oil companies are trying to stay in control through the manipulation of who becomes king.
There are murders and international intrigue, as well as two subplots. One involves Matt Damon as an American derivatives trader living in Geneva with his beautiful wife (Amanda Peet) and their two very cute little boys. The other is about two young Arab men looking for work and being courted by fringe terrorist groups.
Damon is so good that he is likely to get a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work. Of Clooney’s whole "Ocean’s 11" posse, Damon is easily the most talented.
"He’s it, the real thing," Clooney said when we talked about Damon.
Damon is a standout, but there are plenty of "smaller" roles played by terrific actors including Tom McCarthy, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, Mazhar Munir, Jeffrey Wright, Tim Blake Nelson (who has a funny speech explaining the historical importance of corruption) and the memorable Alexander Siddig (as the smart prince).
Indeed, the actors are so uniformly good from the start that they all seem very real, as does the situation. This is "Fahrenheit 411," meaning full of urgent information that rings true in every scene. Liberals and conservatives all have to put gas in their cars. One look at the prices, and you know that "Syriana" is not far off base.
Clooney was there with an unidentified blonde who sat in the back during the Q&A with a black hat pulled down to hide her face. He gained 30 pounds to play a fictionalized Baer. On screen he looks and feels bloated, sporting a gray beard and effecting almost a waddle.
His character is no joke, though. He’s Jack Lemmon from "The China Syndrome," a whistle-blower who wakes up too late to realize his whole life has been a sham.
It’s Clooney’s best and most coherent work on the big screen, and should get him a Best Actor nomination and lots of rave reviews.
"Syriana" is not always easy to follow. Sometimes I felt like I needed a study guide. But Gaghan has made such an engrossing film that you can actually suspend disbelief and just go with it. Once you’re in, you’re in, too. I don’t know if it will make money or be a Best Picture candidate, but "Syriana" is the most intelligent movie of 2005 so far, and incredibly satisfying.
One note though: I would change that poster and ad showing a blind-folded, bearded man. It’s a huge turn-off. It looks like a torture documentary or a prisoner of war saga. Warner Bros. would do well to sell "Syriana" as a thriller soap opera with intrigue, a la "Three Days of the Condor," and make sure to put Damon and Peet’s pictures in there with Clooney’s.
Clooney, you might like to know, also told me after the screening that the recent blow up he had in London was considerably different than the way it was portrayed in the British press and consequently, in our tabloids.
"It was just a guy who was a jerk," he said of the photographer who cornered him in an alley. "I thought about hitting him, but I didn’t."
November 17, 2005 Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
Syriana
George Clooney has his own take on Syriana, the hot potato he executive-produced and in which he stars as Bob Barnes, a CIA agent caught in the twisting, toxic tentacles of Big Oil: "It's going to get us in a lot of trouble." Let's hope so. Why toss a political grenade into the multiplex if you don't expect scorched earth? Syriana, written and directed in a fever of risk-taking provocation by Stephen Gaghan, takes off with the lightning speed of a thriller, the gonzo force of frontline journalism and the emotional wallop of a drama that puts a human face on shocking statistics. Global oil corruption has seeped into every facet of our lives, from the collusion of White House and business interests in the Persian Gulf to the financial squeeze we all feel just pumping gas. No dry civics lesson, this fighting-mad film isn't just hot, it's incendiary. And no one gets off the hook. You see it with the exhilarating feeling that a movie can make a difference.
The first surprise is Clooney himself. Bearded and bloated from the thirty-five pounds he packed on to play Barnes, he gives us a ground soldier who's been used and used up by the CIA's war on Middle East terrorism. Here is a man, struggling to put his son through college, who can order the assassination of Prince Nasir (the superb Alexander Siddig) for favoring China over the U.S. in an oil deal ("Hit him with a truck going fifty miles per hour"), stand up to fingernail-yanking torture from former operatives and still be amazed when the Firm plays him for a patsy. This is the best acting Clooney has ever done -- he's hypnotic, haunting and quietly devastating.
See No Evil, the 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, serves as the film's starting point. In the manner of his Oscar-winning script for Traffic -- the drug trade expose given a documentary feel by director Steven Soderbergh that Syriana emulates -- Gaghan casts his net wide through interlocking stories. Matt Damon gives a whiplash performance as energy analyst Bryan Woodman, willing to use the accidental death of his son in the house of Prince Nasir for his own gain. He tells his horrified wife (Amanda Peet) that working for Nasir will be like having their own personal ATM. For Washington lawyer Bennett Holiday (the reliably brilliant Jeffrey Wright), success means helping his boss (Christopher Plummer, doing patrician hauteur to a turn) finesse a merger between two Texas oil companiesâ the giant Connex and the smaller Killen, run by Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper). Pope's wingman Danny Dalton, played with razor-edge timing by Tim Blake Nelson, one-ups the "Greed is good" speech from Wall Street by extolling the "safe and warm" qualities of corruption.
Gaghan is in top form, mixing potent writing with images that tear at the heart, such as the sight at the madrassa of a Pakistani migrant worker (Mazhar Munir) -- both he and his father are laid off by Connex after Nasir's deal with the Chinese -- being persuasively indoctrinated into Islamic fundamentalism. Syriana is a tough nut that demands attention, refuses to ingratiate and keeps throwing curves -- Barnes finding his moral center, Holiday losing his. It's the kind of give-'em-hell filmmaking that Hollywood left for dead, the kind that matters. Clooney says his company will produce more movies like Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana. Godspeed.
November 17, 2005 Maclean's by Brian D. Johnson
Clooney to the rescue
George Clooney, once considered a lightweight pretty boy, is beginning to look like the new Warren Beatty. Actor, producer, director and activist, he has emerged as the most forceful liberal voice in Hollywood.
He's barely recognizable. His face is hidden by a heavy, unkempt beard. The bedroom eyes, once compared to quicksand by a giddy female journalist, appear sad and strained. His frame is dragged down by an extra 35 lb. of bulk, and he walks with the tired gait of a man who looks like he's courting a heart attack. This is George Clooney playing a secret agent with a licence to kill. But he doesn't look one bit like James Bond. He doesn't even look like George Clooney. In Syriana, Hollywood's most eligible bachelor erases his glamour and melts into an ensemble cast -- as a cog in a political thriller about a corrupt oil industry greasing American aggression in the Persian Gulf. George has never been less himself. He doesn't smile. He speaks Arabic and Farsi. And he endures a horrific torture scene that has left him, in real life, with a painful spinal injury.
He takes one for the team.
Syriana, which Clooney helped produce, may be the most audacious movie ever released by a Hollywood studio at a time of war: it traces the roots of Arab terrorism in the deserts of the Gulf back to the cold corridors of power in the heart of the American empire. This is one American movie where the terrorists are not the bad guys. In fact, teenage suicide bombers are portrayed more sympathetically than Washington bureaucrats. The film arrives on the heels of Good Night, And Good Luck, which Clooney directed and co-wrote -- a portrait of anti-McCarthyite CBS anchor Edward R. Murrow that plays as a cautionary tale of American civil liberties under siege. Neither movie is a blockbuster, but both have Oscar potential. Amid the atomized dissent of America's culture war, these films play like contemporary equivalents of '60s protest songs. And with their combined heft, the actor who found fame as a dreamboat doctor on E.R. has emerged as the most forceful liberal voice in Hollywood.
You could say George Clooney is the new Warren Beatty. There are striking parallels between these two debonair Democrats. They're both actors who proved they were more than pretty faces by producing and directing their own movies. They forged reputations as serious party boys before getting serious about party politics. And they comport themselves like unelected politicians, ready to rumble with conservatives. Beatty makes a campus speech berating California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger; Clooney has a public brawl with right-wing pundit Bill O'Reilly. Unlike Beatty, Clooney has not threatened to run for office. But he's only 44. And director David O. Russell, who almost came to blows with him on the set of Three Kings (another tale of American misadventure in the Persian Gulf) unleashed this bitter diatribe in Vanity Fair: "He's a super-political, extremely manipulative guy, and he's not an artist. I think George is super-invested in making himself look like a good guy all the time. I think George will be president."
Well, who knows? Maybe the Democrats could use a candidate who (like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) doesn't appear to be smarter than the average voter. It should be noted, however, that the reason Russell was so angry with Clooney is that the actor had berated him for screaming at the crew members. "My job," said Clooney, "was to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating."
Born in Kentucky, Clooney grew up with a first-hand taste of both celebrity and politics -- his aunt was singer Rosemary Clooney and his Democrat father, Nick Clooney, a former TV anchor, made an unsuccessful bid for Congress last year. Yet Clooney doesn't display Beatty's sense of entitlement. His suave charm is undercut by a self-deprecating candour. Beatty, whose ego is legendary, has always cast himself as the star of his own movies, from Reds to Bullworth. But in his two directorial efforts, Good Night and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Clooney stepped aside and handed the lead roles to character actors.
He's not a one-man show. With director Steven Soderbergh, Clooney is part of a Hollywood New Wave that's intent on wielding studio clout to subvert both the substance and style of American movies. Soderbergh first dignified Clooney's career by casting him in Out of Sight (1998). And in 2000, they formed a production company at Warner Bros. called Section Eight.They've worked on seven films together -- from pop hits like Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve to art-house flops like Solaris and Dangerous Mind. And a social conscience has begun to emerge. Their last two projects, Good Night and Syriana, were backed by eBay pioneer Jeffrey Skoll, a Canadian who says he supports movies that are trying to "bring about social change."
Good Night was a small film made almost entirely on a single set. But Syriana, which cost US$50 million, is an epic shot on three continents, in locations ranging from Casablanca to Dubai. It was scripted and directed by Oscar-winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who wrote Soderbergh's Traffic. And although Syriana is an original story, it was "suggested" by former CIA agent Robert Baer's 2002 memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.
Essentially, Syriana does for the war on terror what Traffic did for the war on drugs. Both, says Gaghan, are "wars against an abstraction." And he first noticed a parallel between them when he met with high-level Pentagon officials while researching Traffic. "At that time," he told Maclean's, "the counter-narcotics and counterterrorism bureau were the same guy. I started thinking our biggest addiction is how we're hooked on foreign oil. It's like drugs. You're sitting with the dealer, and you're not questioning him about his personal life, commenting on the malnourished children who are sitting in front of the cartoon network while there's a handgun on the table. You take a moral asterisk. It's the same with oil. Who cares what's going on, as long as the good stuff keeps flowing."
Baer took Gaghan on a tour of the Middle East, where he'd worked as an agent for 21 years. He introduced him to CIA operatives, arms dealers and Islamic militants. When Clooney offered to play Bob, the character loosely based on Baer, Gaghan had his doubts. "Baer could blend into every situation," he says. "You don't go to movie stars for their ability to blend in. You go to them for the opposite -- they're the guys who score the touchdown and get the girl." Clooney not only transformed himself but sacrificed his US$20-million fee and worked for a hairstylist's salary, says Gaghan. "George is willing to use his status to make things he really cares about." And as Bob, he reveals a dark side we've never seen. "For such a happy-go-lucky guy, he has a real streak of melancholy that fits with the tone of the film."
Clooney's rumpled character is akin to John le Carré's Smiley, an intelligence veteran confounded by functionaries with no interest in intelligence. In that sense he embodies Baer, whose book mixes wild anecdote with stern condemnation of Washington for sabotaging the CIA while letting terrorism flourish. After killing an arms dealer in Tehran, Bob is offered a cushy desk job -- if he performs one last assignment. He is sent to assassinate the charismatic and progressive Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), heir to the throne in an unnamed, oil-rich country in the Persian Gulf.
But Clooney's character occupies only one of many storylines in a realpolitik maze that's so hard to decipher you're tempted to go fishing for a decoder ring in your popcorn. Just watching this film becomes an intelligence mission, as the mind races to keep up with the dense but brilliant intrigue.
There are byzantine declensions of evil. Chris Cooper plays a venal Texas oilman with the same Southern-fried swagger he brought to the role of a Marine officer in Jarhead. A gothically sinister Christopher Plummer, pruning roses as he conspires, portrays the godfather of a Washington law firm trying to legitimize a shady oil merger. Jeffrey Wright serves as his obtuse henchman. As a CIA sage, William Hurt dispenses wisdom in eye-dropper doses, like pure heroin. In yet another subplot, the ever-preppy Matt Damon plays a financial whiz whose marriage runs aground as he finds a poolside niche in Nasir's desert kingdom.
At the other end of this geopolitical food chain are two teenage migrant workers, who get recruited to the jihad after losing their jobs when the oil fields are taken over by the Chinese. Though destined to be terrorist martyrs, they emerge as the film's most innocent characters, casualties of an economic quake who lose their place in this world, and are seduced by the glamour of a promised land that requires no work permit.
In that sense, this Hollywood epic has a bizarre affinity to a small, award-winning film that comes directly from the Middle East -- Paradise Now, a riveting Palestinian thriller about two decent but misguided young men who are enlisted as suicide bombers against Israel. Both movies even feature martyr videos made by terrorists before embarking on their missions. Surprisingly, the Palestinian film is more cynical about the suicide-bombing business: as a prospective martyr delivers his last words to the camera, the tape malfunctions, and the bored video operator, idly munching on a sandwich, asks for a second take.
Oddly enough, Paradise Now is also more accessible than Syriana, and plays more freely with Hollywood formula. It begins as a buddy movie. Before terrorism is an issue, we develop an affection for its slacker protagonists, Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), childhood friends in the West Bank town of Nablus who are stuck in dead-end jobs as auto mechanics. Saïd is on the verge of falling in love with a lovely, sensible young woman when he and Khaled are conscripted to carry out a strike in Tel Aviv. They are ritually shaved, strapped with explosives -- and dressed in black suits right out of Reservoir Dogs.
Writer-director Hany Abu-Assad has managed to make a movie that bristles with discourse -- virtually every character articulates a distinct argument in the Palestinian conflict -- yet it builds nail-biting suspense more efficiently than most Hollywood thrillers. It helps that something real is at stake. The script was partly based on interrogation transcripts of captured suicide bombers who had failed their missions. And it was filmed in Nablus, in the crossfire of a war zone. But after a rocket attack, a land mine explosion and the kidnapping of the locations manager -- who was freed by the intervention of Yasser Arafat -- the crew finally moved the shoot to safer ground in Nazareth.
Paradise Now clearly disapproves of terrorism. But the movie shows us the human face of suicide bombers, and helps us understand why they exist. From the opposite end of world cinema, Syriana tries to do the same thing. Hollywood had been fighting the war on terror well before George W. Bush got into the act -- the swarthy, bomb-happy psycho has long been the villain of choice in the action blockbuster. So it's jarring, to say the least, to see a studio film that depicts terrorists with a measure of pathos, as cannon fodder in a war beyond their comprehension.
Clooney endured his own war in making Syriana, and didn't make it easy on himself. In filming the graphic torture scene, he tore the sheath protecting his spinal fluid, and has suffered brutal headaches ever since. "I basically bruised my brain," he says. There seems to be a cruel irony at work. Clooney is a star unafraid to play older, and sometimes dumber -- the Coen brothers cast him as a verbose idiot in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Now, he's hurt his brain while playing an intelligence officer who's too smart for his own good. Bob, working undercover in Beirut, tells whoever asks that he's Canadian. Uh oh. One more reason for conservatives to suspect George of un-American activities.
November 17, 2005, Aintitcoolnews
Moriarty Interviews Stephen Gaghan About SYRIANA!!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Early Friday morning, on my way to Malibu, and I’m desperately trying to keep one eye on the road while I finish reading some research material I’ve downloaded from the Internet. I’m concerned that I’m going to sound like an idiot when I interview Stephen Gaghan, writer/director of the pulverizing new film SYRIANA, so I find myself overdoing it on the prep ahead of time.
I’ve spoken with Gaghan before, but never in person. Over the years, we’ve had occasion to chat on the phone, and I’ve always thought of him as bright. Seeing SYRIANA, though, I find that I’m suddenly intimidated by how smart he really is. TRAFFIC played like a movie written on instinct, written from the gut, written from some hard-lived experience. SYRIANA is dense, challenging; it bombards the viewer with information, never giving you a chance to disconnect. It’s scary-smart, and it’s going to be fascinating to see what sort of culture bomb it is when Warner Bros. unleashes it later this month. I'll warn you right here... it's impossible to talk about this film without talking about some of the story elements, but even though there are sizeable spoilers in this interview, this film is impossible to ruin with discussion. It's an experience you just have to have in a theater with the best fucking sound system you can find. Seriously.
I park across the PCH from Gaghan’s house and wait for a gap in traffic to run across the street. It may be November, but it’s gorgeous outside, clear blue sky overhead, and even though the jacket I have on is thin, it’s still a little on the warm side. Once I walk inside, I find myself in a small courtyard, where Gaghan’s two kids play while his assistant and a Warner Bros. publicist welcome me. We chat for a moment while he finishes a phone call, and then the door suddenly opens and I find myself face to face with him. He’s tall, thin almost to the point of gaunt, and his hair is peppered with grey. We shake hands, and I follow him into the living room, where his writing desk is set up. I settle into the seat across from him, and despite having an amazing view of the beach and the Pacific Ocean through the window by his desk, I find as we speak that I’m more drawn to the gigantic LAWRENCE OF ARABIA poster that takes up most of the wall.
As I set up my tape recorder, Gaghan reads me an e-mail he just got from Graydon Carter, editor of VANITY FAIR, who saw the film the night before. There’s a line in the e-mail that is evidently a fairly common refrain among those who have taken an early peek at the film, saying it’s great but it won’t make a dime, and making a crack about how it’s “too sophisticated for those red-state punters.”
STEPHEN GAGHAN: [laughs] I am a red-state punter.
M: It’s funny. I think people are going to adopt this film politically on either side of the argument, whatever argument you’re having. That’s one of the things that hit me right off. It’s real easy to insert your own politics into this film, and it’s real easy to miss that there are many other points of view being offered.
SG: That’s what I was hoping and, god, that’s such a great way to put it. “Insert your own politics.”
Gaghan took a moment to write the phrase down.
M: Listen, I loved the movie. I thought it was extraordinary. It’s sinking in more as I get distance from it, and I look forward to seeing it again. Especially now that I hear that what I saw wasn’t finished. I guess there was some temp track still in it, some edits that weren’t quite done. I had no idea. It felt finished. It felt complete. What really struck me is that I don’t think it’s a film about oil or about politics or even about the intelligence community. I saw this as a film about anger, and the way anger gets turned inward, and what do you do with it? In your case, you can take your anger and go make SYRIANA, a big-budget film with George Clooney and Matt Damon, and that’s how you channel your anger. But what can other people do? Do you become a terrorist? Do you kill someone? Do you just give up and sell out? What is it that you do when you’re that filled with rage?
He didn’t respond at first. He just sort of looked at me, then shook his head.
SG: I need to write this down because... I really need to write down what you just said. Honestly, I... let me just write that down, and then I’ll explain why. For the next three or four minutes, I wandered around the room, browsing his DVD shelves, while Gaghan busily typed on his laptop. I was pleased to see that he organizes his shelves the same way I do, just randomly tossing DVDs on as they come into the house, eschewing all attempts to place them in any sort of alphabetical order. I also took the opportunity to look at his bookshelves, which were crammed with non-fiction material.
M: I love looking at people’s bookshelves.
SG: Almost all of this is... a lot of this has to do with this movie and... this is where I work. Almost all of these are from the last few movies. The war on drugs. The Alamo. Oil. Intelligence. There are a few novels or historical books that I thought were really relevant. I mean, DECLINE AND FALL is unbelievable. The guy talks about King Mithridates. King Mithridates could be Saddam Hussein. In 80 B.C., Caesar is Bush, and Mithridates is Hussein. It’s exactly the same paradigm, and it’s been going on for over 2000 years. It’s so funny. I mean, I’m not so well-educated that I can really talk about it, but when I read that, I was like, “Wow.”
He went back to typing for another couple of minutes, and once he was finally finished, he snapped shut the cover of his laptop.
SG: Okay. I haven’t talked to that many people yet. I’ve talked to maybe ten people, and nobody’s come close to saying why I did it. Because it’s been four years since I started writing it, you kind of forget in the shooting and in the post, especially when you’re in collaboration with a multi-national corporation, what you’re really setting out to do and what that complete early energy came from. I was pissed off. I mean, I was really pissed off. You’re exactly right. I remember sitting there thinking weird kinds of thoughts. “Is capitalism a zero sum game?” I don’t know, but is it? Y’know, Marxists would say that capitalism’s a zero sum game. A capitalist would say... look, a Marxist would say “If you dig a 500 foot hole in Indonesia, there would be a 500 foot tall pile of wealth in America. The world’s totally in balance. Wealth’s not created or destroyed. It’s just moved around from the have-nots to the haves.” Well, that’s interesting, but is it true?
Capitalists would say, “Are you kidding? Look what we’re doing with Gremean banks and micro-economic lending. Micro-economic lending is the most important thing that happens on this globe in terms of empowering people. We can loan... we go to Africa, and we have a program...” This was a lawyer who told me this who represents Saudi Arabia as a client. He said, “We take these micro-economic loans to Africa and we only make the loans to women, and maybe the loan is as small as a simple cell phone, and now this woman can start a phone company, and everyone within 50 miles will be transformed. That’s the power of capitalism.” I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But I had to... I felt... what I felt was, I love my country. I love America. Really love it. I was numb during the ‘90s, like everybody. I think everybody was just like, “It’s Fukuyama. THE END OF HISTORY. Democracy and capitalism have won. Game, set, match. We’re just going to cash in our stock options and go shopping.” If you own a little stock in an Internet company, you’ll have a $7 million house in Bel Air, and you don’t have to think about anything ever again, you know? Then it’s like boom, that market explodes, buildings come down on 9/11, and in rapid order, there’s our response, which is heightened rhetoric. Crazy powerful rhetoric like, “We’re on a crusade.” And suddenly I’m in the back seat of this car, which is America, and I feel it turning, and then we’re in war in Afghanistan, and we’re in war in Iraq. We’re in a standing ground war in Asia which, if you know your PRINCESS BRIDE, is a bad idea. And we’re rattling our fists at Syria and Iran. And... man... I’m not numb anymore. I’m sitting here going “What’s going on? What’s it mean to be us?” Because, like, for me, we declared War On Drugs, which is like a War On Molecules. A total abstraction. Seratonin uptake inhibitors which are depressed by cocaine... that’s immoral... but gabba receptors, which is alcohol... that’s moral. It’s just so weird. And then suddenly that comes a cropper. When I was researching TRAFFIC at the Pentagon, Counter-Narcotics and Counter-Terrorism were in the same office. Same office in ’98. Think about that. So all of a sudden, we now have a War On Terror, which, I’m like, “All right.” By the time I’m at terror, I’m beyond reasoning with. I’m a horse fleeing a fire. Let’s declare war on fear and misunderstanding. Start with fear. I was scared to get on an airplane after 9/11. Physically scared to do it.
M: Oh, I’m sure. I have to fly a lot, and I’m sure you do, too. It’s the nature of the business. Y’know, this film strikes me as... and not as an homage or a pastiche or an imitation... but as a genuine ‘70s film. It’s the kind of film that guys like Pakula and Pollack and Friedkin were making. It struck me the same way SORCERER did. I had that same sort of powerful, physical reaction. I found myself getting uncomfortable in the theater several times because of how immediate it is, how intense it gets. In particular, the story of how somebody becomes a suicide bomber is one of the most affecting things I’ve seen all year. There are other films out there right now that deal with some of these ideas, like THE WAR WITHIN and PARADISE NOW. It’s in the air. Right now, we’re just trying to understand how someone can walk into a building or get on a bus with a bomb. What could possibly get you to that place? In your film, the process seems not only natural, but deceptively simple. How did you research that? And considering that this is a film funded by a multi-national corporation, as you put it, how did you ever sell that to a studio?
SG: Well, let’s start with the last question first. It was a naturally emotional story, and I think Warner Bros. deserves a lot of credit. They never said to me, “Soften this.” None of their questions or comments were about “We’re going to take a lot of shit for this.” They were questions about... they were just good dramatic questions. “How do we make this clearer? How do we make it more emotional? What are you really trying to say?” A couple of things happened for me. I read TERROR & LIBERALISM by Paul Berman. Well, first I read the excerpt in The New York Times, where he talked about the philosophy of [Sayyid Qutb]. Berman parsed the 26-volume book which is called IN THE SHADE OF THE QUR’AN. It was written by this guy Qutb, who spent time in America. He’s Egyptian. Academic. And [Berman] very persuasively showed me that what was going on in the world right now is, there is a war of ideas. That these clerics in the Muslim world had a very serious idea. He says that idea had been cross-pollinated with facism, totalitarian ideology from the West. He shows where it could have happened in Egypt. I don’t know if that’s true or not. I wasn’t 100% persuaded by that.
But what I was persuaded by was how seductive the ideas were, and how powerful. Like the notion that you could be part of the greater good. That God has a plan for you. The Koran has that plan written down. If I was a disenfranchised young person who had taken a lot of blows to my self-esteem, who didn’t really know where to go in the world, who had no education, and if someone came along with these ideas that I found in TERROR & LIBERALISM, that are found in Qutb, and took me seriously, and talked to me about this stuff, it would be unbelievably seductive.
M: Well, you totally get that from the film. This kid is marked. It’s a terrible thing, the... the circumstances that he bumps up against. There is no other reaction open to him. Of course he feels like he’s being persecuted, that it’s unjust, and something has to be done to redress it.
SG: I read this incredible article when I was location scouting in the Middle East. It was either in the Khaleej Times or in the Gulf Times, and it was an interview with the father of a son who had blown himself up. The dad said, “I was napping. My son woke me up, and he borrowed 35 cents. That’s the last time I saw my son alive.” He said, “35 cents is a boy-sized amount of money. That’s what a boy... a child... borrows. An adult doesn’t borrow 35 cents.” And his point was, whatever your political ideology, how can you use a child in this way? And the pain of it just rocked me, y’know? And I wanted to get that in because I’m a dad. I have two small children, y’know? It just... we’re living in this... heightened rhetoric, y’know? “Evildoers... and we’re the force of right and good.” And I just wanted to see things from this human side that I related to.
M: My nightmares have changed since I had my son. And you got me twice in SYRIANA. Bad. It’s not the death of Damon’s son that does it. It’s the scene where he holds his other son in front of the window all night long that does it.
SG: That’s so funny. It’s a funny story where that scene started. I was writing... I want to go back to your question about the political films of the ‘70s...
M: Sure.
SG: ... but I was writing SYRIANA. I had written a lot. I was feeling disconnected from the material. Like it just didn’t have the heart that I thought it would need. It felt too intellectual or something. So I was talking to a friend of mine... and, um... it was actually Miranda July, who I had met at the Sundance Labs. I had read her script, and I thought ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, and I was just... I was e-mailing with her about something or another, and I remember saying, “I just feel so disconnected from what I’m doing in a way.” And I had told her in this same e-mail... I had described my son having had a nightmare, and that I went down and picked him up, and he immediately said, “I want to look out the window,” and then I went and I held him. And… and… it was around the time that his mother and I split up. And we were alone. She wasn’t there. So I was alone in the house with the kids, and I just... held him in the window... for like two hours... and we looked out at the streetlight. And, uh... it was really powerful for me, y’know? And Miranda wrote me back and said, “That’s what the movie’s about. That’s what you’re trying to do.” And I was just, “Oh, yeah.”
M: It seems appropriate that it’s the moment where you reconnected to the script, because it seems like it’s the moment where Damon reconnects to life after being shocked into paralysis. I mean... how do you pick up from what happens to him and his wife?
SG: I felt like when you suffer something catastrophic, there is such a tremendous amount of self-hatred and I thought it... just thinking about it, it would be very hard to go home. Everything would remind you of this. I thought what an interesting time for someone like this... a sort of upper-middle-class striver... to come into contact with this black hole of incredible wealth that these oil-producing nations are. They just... they generate so much money, and it creates its own gravity and morality and psychology and up and down and north and south all get mutated when they come in contact with this. And I’ve seen it among people I know who work on the fringes of this world, who interface in the financial community with these billionaire families. And it’s that thing that you hear in Hollywood a lot. “Oh, I know he’s really an awful guy, but he’s not so bad to me.” And, uh, y’know, those are the kinds of little asterisks that we give ourselves, the little outs. And... going back to what you said earlier... I love conspiracy films from the ‘70s. I love the straight-up political films of the ‘70s. Y’know, it doesn’t matter if it’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN or Z or, um, 3 DAYS OF THE CONDOR...
M: There’s a real strong TOUCH OF EVIL vibe to your movie, too.
SG: ... and, particularly, THE PARALLAX VIEW, where at the end of the day, it’s the military-industrial complex, and in CONDOR, Redford’s on the steps of The New York Times, and he’s going in there, and the guy says, “Y’know, the people that are behind me... do you really think they’ll let you..?” And in the ‘70s, it was always the punchline. The last moment. “Ta-dah! It’s the oil companies and the military-industrial complex! Ta-dah!” And I thought today, with what’s happened in the 30 years since then, is... FADE IN: It’s the Oil Companies. Now what? The punchline’s gone. The punchline’s become the starting point. FADE OUT became FADE IN. Okay. Now what? The conspiracies are in broad daylight. Nobody’s hiding them. The lingua franca has so changed in terms of what we would consider a conspiracy. I just... I thought, “What an interesting thing for this type of movie.”
M: I was doing some reading last night about Robert Baer [author of SEE NO EVIL: THE TRUE STORY OF A GROUND SOLDIER IN THE CIA’S WAR ON TERRORISM], and I see that the ultimate credit on the film is “Inspired by.” Obviously you’ve read volumes of material, and I love the way your film handles the Intelligence community. I’ve grown up fascinated by this world, starting with spy fiction and popular fiction, but I’ve also read every bit of non-fiction I can get my hands on about the history of how it’s developed in this country, and it’s rarely done right on film. People create cartoon spies for movies so we never see what real spies are or how they’re used. This film gets into what I believe is the state of intelligence gathering right now. I think Clooney’s performance is pretty epic. He nails who these guys are, these ghosts.
SG: He does. I was able to travel with Bob a lot and travel to the south of France. I didn’t take a lot from his book. The movie doesn’t really come from SEE NO EVIL, but the movie comes in large part from Bob’s life and his own experiences and his attitudes. The first thing he said to me was, “All right, you want to meet some of the players in the Persian Gulf? Then come with me to the south of France in August.” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “Oh, yeah, if you’re worth anything in the Persian Gulf, you think you stay there in August? It’s 130 degrees. Everybody’s on their yachts in the south of France.” So we went there and we went on boats with people who were the heads of intelligence for an African Muslim nation. We met billionaires who were in the oil business or middle men in the arms business who were billionaires. It was amazing to me that a mid-level CIA officer who was the Iraqi bureau chief in the ‘90s had in his cell phone the numbers of multi-billionaires. And he would call them on their personal cell phones and they’d pick up and say, “Oh, hey, Bob. Sure. Goin’ out with the fam on the boat tomorrow. Come on out. Oh, you have a friend? Bring him. Sure. Bring him along. No problem.” I watched him at length with these people and I realized, one, it wasn’t at all what I thought it was. That what Bob was primarily was a nexus for information. The reason these men, these well-known men, these super-powerful famous people, were interested in spending time with him was because he was of use to them. Because he knew things that they didn’t know and wanted to know. These are serious people, and what they do when they get together is they exchange informa