Amy's Robot

Syriana: the anti-Gestalt

I went to see Syriana last night, then spent the next hour and a half trying to untangle what I just saw. This is a movie that is very smart about really complex and murky subject matter--the oil industry and the way governments, lawyers, and big business can get all mixed up along with corruption, culture clashes, and terorrism. It's a smart movie that knows it's smart, so doesn't seem to feel the need to make its hundreds of implied connections between characters very clear, or explain the inner workings of the Justice Department or the CIA, or, unfortunately, do much character development.

This movie is going to get a lot of positive press, and critics like Richard Roeper will say it's his favorite movie of the year so far (video of Ebert and Roeper review.) Please keep in mind that Richard Roeper's other favorite movies of the year have included Gangs of New York and the horrible Mystic River (#2). A.O. Scott, who tends to like the thinky movies, writes in his review, "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."

The writer and director of Syriana is the same guy who wrote Traffic, which was such a great take on the international drug trade. Remember Benicio del Toro and his conflicted corrupt-turned-straight Mexican cop? And stoned little rich girl Erika Christensen? You probably do, since they were memorable characters that had some depth.

Maybe Syriana just has too many characters to go much further than giving each of them a single fact about their personal lives that stands in for actual development. Jeffrey Wright's dad is a drunk. George Clooney's teenage son is sick of all the secrets caused by his dad's high security clearance. But so what? If this movie was a documentary about the inner workings of the oil industry, I wouldn't care about the motivations and conflicts of the players involved, but this is a movie, you know? Characters and interwoven plots that all add up to something bigger are the whole point.

It's kind of too bad, because the actors are all fantastic: Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson, George Clooney, and Alexander Siddig are all really great, even Matt Damon does an especially good job with what he has to work with.

The movie also tends to make little to no differentiation between nationalities and ethnicities in the Middle East. Lebanese, Iranian, Arab--they all seem to get used fairly interchangeably. Some real distinctions are made between some Pakistani immigrant oil field workers and the Arabs whose country they work in, but that was about it.

Syriana is very intelligent and has some interesting things to say about oil and corruption, but watching it left me feeling like I'd just struggled to put together a really intricate puzzle, then when I'd finally finished it, it turned out to just be a big swath of beige.

So once you've watched this movie and then spent some time figuring out what happened and exactly why Christopher Plummer is so hugely influential in seemingly every circle, maybe you can tell me why it mattered at all in the movie that Jeffrey Wright's father is an alcoholic.

Official movie site.

categories: Movies
posted by amy at 5:38 PM | #