Syriana manages to be both one of the most cynical and most intelligent movies of the year.
There is a scene in this movie where Bob, George Clooney's character, is being grilled by some government official, who thinks he can provide her good information to back up the assertion that the U.S. Government is starting to succeed in Iran. He tries to avoid the question, but when that seems to give this official the sense that she is in command of the situation, he gets irritated at her naiveté and lashes out, sputtering in an attempt to clarify the situation and the wrong-headedness of her thoughts on it. He has spent many years in the region, working for the CIA and getting a good sense of how things work. Back in Washington, he can't believe that it can be so poorly understood by people actively working to change the region. That sputtering, frustrated response is exactly how it feels to try and review the movie.
The film is so dense, so labyrinth and so thoroughly impossible to understand every little element of, that writing a review that makes much sense is problematic. There are numerous plot lines and even more characters, who slowly develop connections that bring about some level of understanding of the big picture. I could attempt to dissect the plot for you but the review would end up being dozens of pages long and still not really clear things up for you. It's also doubtful you'd bother to read more than two to three pages before giving up. None of that should indicate that the movie is badly made or unpleasant to watch. Far from it actually. The impenetrable details of the movie create a sense of just how complex the situation is and how virtually nobody can truly understand all aspects of it.
We tend to think of oil in terms of our cars and how much we have to pay to fill them up. When the price goes up we talk of how oil companies are just gouging us for more money. Syriana adds a few wrinkles to that equation. Just how much oil is left in the world? Where is it located? Who controls the areas it is located in? How do those people feel about America? What other countries are competing for control of oil production? Who exactly is buying it and how many times does it get resold before making its way to the gas station? Are economies being stifled by an inability procure enough oil? Those are just the first few questions that rolled off the top of my head a couple hours after seeing the movie. I didn't even vaguely tackle the questions involving corruption and the companies that deal in oil.
There are countless characters in the movie, some major, some minor but every one of them manages to have an impact on the situation. Take for instance the Pakistani man who is left unemployed after two oil companies merge. Threatened with the possibility of being deported, he falls into a Muslim school where he meets a teacher who preaches about the evils of Western society and capitalism. It's not too long before he has been totally enthralled by the teacher and finds himself on a suicide mission to blow up an oil tanker belonging to the company that laid him off. That probably sounds like a big spoiler but if you see the movie it turns out to just be one small element of a massive web.
Writer/director Stephen Gaghan obviously enjoys this approach to a topic. He earlier wrote the movie Traffic which had a very similar style to deal with the drug problem. It would be very easy to accuse him of trying to force an opinion on the audience but that would be a knee jerk response. The movie actually attempts to tackle all angles and throw them all up in a big jumble to illustrate how dangerous it is to fall back on simplistic ideas about oil. It's not just the corruption of oil companies. It isn't just the dangerous radical Muslims. It isn't just petty dictators sitting on huge oil reserves. It isn't just U.S. foreign policy. All of these things are a factor, along with many others. Sometimes it comes down to personal relations and luck.
The massive cast are uniformly excellent. Clooney dramatically underplays his part as a CIA agent encountering an uncomfortable shift of career, giving the constant feeling that he knows a lot more than he is willing to share with anyone. It also gives him a haunted quality that makes you wonder what he has done in the course of his job and how proud he is of all of it. Matt Damon plays a trader who will take advantage of any situation to make the deal. Does that make him a bad guy? At first yes, but time makes us wonder if he works so hard to try and deal with a painful loss. Alexander Siddig plays the son of the Emir of an unnamed Middle East nation. The more we know him the more complex he becomes. Siddig does a great job of playing the character in a manner that plays differently the more you learn about him. Jeffrey Wright does much the same as an attorney called in to do due diligence on a proposed merger of oil companies. Where as Siddig becomes more sympathetic the more we know him, Wright goes in the other direction. Those are just some of the big roles but praise is also well earned for Amanda Peet, William Hurt, Christopher Plummer, Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson and Mazhar Munir. The only serious complaint I could level against the movie is that it can be emotionally chilly. This is not to criticize the actors but a realization of the limitations of a movie that combines so many characters and plot lines in such a short time. Sometimes the emotion gets the short end of the stick.
It is virtually impossible to find a critic who doesn't complain about Hollywood dumbing down movies. For once, we have a movie that flies hard in the face of that complaint. Syriana is intelligent and densely so. Viewers will be hard pressed to take it all in during a single sitting. Multiple viewings should prove very rewarding as the connections between the story lines become clearer. The flip side of all that is that this is not a movie for anyone with a short attention span. It takes a large portion of the movie's running time for things to start to become clear and even the sharpest of viewers are unlikely to put it all together right away. If that turns you off, fear not, virtually every other movie playing in a theater right now will require a lot less effort from your brain.
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