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Syriana
Everything is, like, super corrupt
2005
Review: December 7, 2005
Director: Stephen Gaghan
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffery Wright, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer
No way.
THE SETUP:
Traffic II: Big Oil Edition
DISCUSSION:
Watching this movie, one thought kept going through my head: all those movie critics I read who reviewed this film with an air of understanding what the hell was going on were HARDCORE BULLSHITTING. This shit is really dense. The first thing I said to my friend when the lights came up was “Well, I got pretty much nothing out of that.”
Written and directed by the writer of Traffic, this film is obviously formed in the mold of that one, with a ton of characters, all connected, whose stories are told in bits that rarely seem to last over 30 seconds. There’s George Clooney [looking more munchable than ever in a beard] as a CIA operative who is selling something or other to someone or other and then he walks out and a car explodes, though we’re never sure of he blew it up or the US blew it up or… what? Got me. The other main characters include Matt Damon as a trader [I guess?] trying to forge a deal with one of the sons of an Emir [king sort of thing], and Jeffery Wright as a lawyer trying to smooth the wheels of a huge oil merger getting through Congress by fingering a few corporate fall guys in order to get the deal through the approval process. Even as I write about this I’m aware of trying to glaze over details to try to disguise how much of this simply went right over my head.
Damon’s wife is played by the underused but eminently capable Amanda Peet, and while it’s nice to see her have something to do other than be a shrill bitch, she doesn’t have a lot of time here. The Jeffery Wright character also has an alcoholic father who camps out on his doorstep looking for a place to stay. It’s clear that this character is here for some structural reason; my friend speculated that the father represented the spirit of the 60s and black community in that he expects his family to take care of him, in contrast with his son who has achieved great success as an African-American, but done it by being kind to his friends, but fucking over the world at large—weeding out small corruption so that larger corruption can pass unhindered. I thought it was something about how the characters in this movie make admirable moral decisions in regards to the people that they know, while at the same time making hideously amoral decisions when it concerns the world at large [i.e. people they don’t directly know].
I watched blankly for an hour before any real connections started to appear, or there even seemed to be any kind of thematic plot to any of the stories, and it was 90 minutes in [of the 120-minute movie] before I really understood what was happening to any of the characters, and even then it was very surface level. But there’s one thing that was made absolutely clear: George Clooney looks really, really hot with that beard.
The value of the movie really comes in processing it afterward. I would be sure to schedule your dinner-and-a-movie evening, in this case, with the dinner after. My initial impression that I didn’t get anything out of the movie didn’t quite turn out to be true. Now, I read the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and my initial feeling was that I didn’t get anything out of this movie that I haven’t gotten out of reading either of those [though you have to read between the lines with the Times, as they’re ostensibly trying to be “objective” and are too timid to really draw many connections or come to conclusions]. Upon reflection I was left with a bit more. At a certain point we are close to a person who chooses to become a suicide bomber, and the structure of the film draws a parallel between him and a more ostensibly heroic main character, and I suppose that’s sort of an achievement. And I guess just humanizing the bomber and detailing his reasons for why he takes his actions has to come off as somewhat radical.
But what’s the ultimate point? What are we supposed to do or think? Like Traffic, the main feeling this film left me with is that the corruption is just too deep and too complex for anything to be done. Though I guess there is value in simply calling a system a farce when that’s what it is. I certainly wasn’t very close or very moved by any of the characters, and I was able to glean so little of what was going on that the action of the film had next to no momentum for me. This film is a good contrast with The Constant Gardner. Where that film was able to tell a very complex story about multi-layered and impossibly entrenched corruption through the perspective of a personal story [that was terribly involving and moving, to boot], this one stays primarily political throughout, one doesn’t get very close to any of the characters, even at their most anguished, and walks out without much of a feeling about anything [except the sense that things are, like, way corrupt]. I definitely admire this movie, but I’m not sure I could advise anyone to see it.
THREE DAYS LATER: I've changed my vote to yes, you should go see it. You should be prepared to get little to no emotional "movie satisfaction," but the stories and the descriptions of all the global connections does stay with you for a few days [so far].
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yeah. See just above.
