The word “complicated” recurs at least twice in the shadowy, conspiratorial early scenes of “Syriana,” and writer-director Stephen Gaghan isn’t kidding. One of the toughest challenges filmmakers face in the political thriller genre is creating an on-screen sense of moral complexity–one unsettling governmental or corporate action leading to another unforeseen or disregarded hu-man reaction–without getting hopelessly scrambled in story terms.
Storywise “Syriana” is pretty vexing. It mixes in a fair amount of narrative murk with its moral twilight. Near the beginning, when a snakelike Big Oil attorney played by Christopher Plummer injects his right-hand man (Jeffrey Wright) with enough knotty exposition to poison a horse, you think, “Shoot, I missed most of that. I wonder if they could show that scene again?”
Yet the film is worth the trouble. More of a mourner than a thriller, “Syriana” takes place in the world, or something like it, as opposed to the movies. Gaghan adapted the 51/2-hour British miniseries “Traffik” into “Traffic” for director Steven Soderbergh. That one was about drugs; “Syriana” concerns oil, connecting some far-flung dots spanning the globe, from oil man to energy analyst to C.I.A. operative to Pakistan-born suicide bomber.
A Texas firm, Connex, is trying to buy up a smaller oil concern that has recently been granted drilling rights in Kazakhstan. The Justice Department eyes the acquisition carefully. Working for Connex, taciturn attorney Bennett Holiday (Wright) shepherds the deal under the cold eye of his boss (Plummer), who is trying to exert some influence with the emir of an unnamed country.
The more progressive of the emir’s sons becomes the target of CIA operative Bob Barnes, played by George Clooney. In a more conventional version of this tale, Barnes would dominate the landscape. A different director might focus on how a loyal company man is betrayed by his company, and how the gun-for-hire exacts revenge. Not “Syriana.” Here, Barnes’ story–in which he is bamboozled by his own people and tortured by others–slips in and out of the other narratives. Clooney is good in this role, and behind his bushy beard and some extra poundage he loses any trace of movie-star vanity.
Matt Damon portrays a Geneva-based energy trader who becomes embroiled in the emir’s family business. When the trader’s son drowns in a freak swimming accident while vacationing in Spain at the emir’s expense, the incident isn’t played for the usual suspense and melodramatics. The aftershock of the event, and the way the trader does and does not deal with it, informs the rest of the story.
Mazhar Munir plays a young Pakistan-born oil worker who, along with his father (Shahid Ahmed), loses his Connex job in the Gulf. How this young man becomes a prime candidate for suicidal terrorism is, in many ways, the most surprising and successful element of “Syriana.” It’s certainly the easiest storyline to track, which is no small virtue in an often puzzlingly laid-out array of characters. Gaghan dares to humanize this murderer in training. I like what this filmmaker is after and what he frequently achieves: a complicated mosaic of injustice, on the theme of what our fossil fuel-dependent economy has come to in the early 21st Century.
When a Tom Clancy book becomes a Tom Clancy movie, filmmakers can usually come up with something that makes sense and, in old-school terms, delivers. Strip away some of the plot, and you’re left with a workable, filmable story of good versus evil that will play in blue states and red states alike. Adapting John Le Carre for the screen, by contrast, producers have a harder time making back their money: Like Graham Greene, Le Carre sees the world in shades of gray, and gray is a tough color to bring to life on screen, even when you’re filming in color.
Politically, “Syriana” is a card-carrying liberal, more in tune with Le Carre and Greene than with Clancy. I wish Gaghan had doped out his stories with more clarity; it’s as if he felt compelled to confirm conservatives’ generalizations about those addlebrained left-wingers. But by the end of the film, he finds his own way to tie everything up without going soft. The final sequences are suspenseful and they mean something. The film’s weary, politically wary vibe sticks with you. And “Syriana” is the first major studio film to figure out how to make a suicide bomber live and breathe on screen without turning him into a monster or a martyr, but simply a man out of a job in an oil-slicked global economy.
`Syriana’
(star)(star)(star)
Written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, based on “See No Evil” by Robert Baer; cinematography by Robert Elswit; production design by Dan Weil; music by Alexandre Desplat; edited by Tim Squyres; produced by Jennifer Fox, Michael Nozik and Georgia Kacandes. A Warner Bros. Pictures release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:06.
Bob Barnes ………… George Clooney
Bryan Woodman ……… Matt Damon
Bennett Holiday ……. Jeffrey Wright
Jimmy Pope ………… Chris Cooper
Stan Goff …………. William Hurt
Wasim Ahmed Khan …… Mazhar Munir
Julie Woodman ……… Amanda Peet
Dean Whiting ………. Christopher Plummer
MPAA rating: R (for violence and language)
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mjphillips@tribune.com
