Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Film review

Confusing script scrambles 'Syriana'

The writer-director tries to do too much with the story, making the movie difficult to follow at times.

By STEVE PERSALL
Published December 8, 2005

[Photo: Warner Bros.]

George Clooney plays Bob Barnes, a CIA agent who infiltrates a weapons deal and kills two arms dealers, in Syriana.

The only way Syriana could be more confusing would be to omit the subtitles used for about one quarter of the dialogue. This is a movie of good intentions and bad storytelling, an inscrutable conspiracy theory involving Middle Eastern oil fields, corporate greed, the CIA, the Department of Justice and budding terrorists.

Separately, each of these topics would inspire engrossing political thrillers, and perhaps even change. Writer-director Stephen Gaghan lumps them together in a jumpy, globe-trotting antinarrative daring viewers to pay attention. There's nothing wrong with challenging audiences, but Syriana is crafted with a broad streak of arrogance: If you don't understand what's happening, you must be part of the problem that isn't being clearly explained.

Gaghan used a similar multilayered approach in his Academy Award-winning screenplay for Traffic, tracing the tentacles of international drug cartels. But that film's director, Steven Soderbergh, was smart to devote much of his first reel to one character, a Mexican policeman at the end of the flow chart. From there, he traced backward, branching to other stories.

Syriana dumps viewers immediately into the morass, yanking us around the world to meet three characters with diverse agendas. George Clooney plays Bob Barnes, a weathered CIA agent infiltrating a weapons deal and killing two arms dealers. One missile slips out of the loop but we'll see it later, detonated by two Palestinians in a suicide mission after losing their oil field jobs when American corporate interests change.

Matt Damon plays Bryan Woodman, an oil industry analyst in charge of dialogue that sounds as if it were written by Alan Greenspan. Bryan is hired by the son of a Persian Gulf emir to design a plan to maximize petroleum profits and autonomy when he takes over his father's position. His younger brother is less qualified to take over and would maintain the status quo of allowing U.S. companies to drill in exchange for easy payoffs.

Jeffrey Wright plays Bennett Holiday, a Washington attorney assigned by a justice official to investigate the proposed merger of two oil companies. Finding something dirty so everything else about the deal appears clean is his job.

Those descriptions make Syriana seem less confusing than it is. Gaghan obviously researched the tangled connections between oil, espionage and terrorism and wants to cram everything he learned into one movie. Doing that inhibits his ability to make any of the conspiracies clear. More than an hour passes before the slightest thing happens to suggest links between Bob, Bryan and Bennett, who are completely unaware of the connections themselves.

We watch Bob left out in the cold by the CIA, Bryan turning his back on his wife (Amanda Peet) because he takes the new job as multimillion-dollar compensation for the accidental death of his son at a party sponsored by the emir. Bennett gets too close to the real crooks in the merger then is tempted by bribes and favors seeping in from a myriad of subplots.

Syriana isn't ripped from the headlines as much as pulled from sixth paragraphs of several stories tucked inside the international news pages. Bringing the possibilities of corruption to light is fine, but making them understandable would be preferred. We get too many scenes ending just when something makes sense, replaced by another international locale to start from scratch. Eventually the leads pile up so high that viewers quit trying to sort them out.

None of the performances are served well by Gaghan's hopscotch narrative. Clooney gets to play grim and overweight in scenes that could be spliced from a John le Carre adaptation. Damon does his tainted frat boy routine, and Wright, usually an electrifying actor, is short-circuited by his role's duty to merely listen.

Other fine actors - Christopher Plummer and Chris Cooper - are left to fill in blanks while opening a few more. Tim Blake Nelson delivers a monologue on the benefits of corruption, and Alexander Siddig (Kingdom of Heaven) speaks eloquently, briefly, on how the Middle East views U.S. intrusions. Pieces of Syriana such as these are momentarily illuminating, before Gaghan shifts our attention elsewhere - such as to any other movie.

Grade: C

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Cast: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Siddig, Amanda Peet, Christopher Plummer, Tim Blake Nelson, Chris Cooper, Mazhar MunirScreenplay: Stephen Gaghan, suggested by the book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism by Robert Baer

Rating: R; profanity, violence, mature themes

Running time: 126 min.

[Last modified December 7, 2005, 11:01:06]