Stephen Gaghan is a writer and director who is not shy of complexity. He has a rare and touching belief in the ability of his audience to think and to be able to follow complicated screenplays. 2000's Traffic, that excellent examination of the international drug trade, demanded much from its audience. Through various stories — from a White House drug czar to a Mexican cop battling distribution in his own patch — we were able to see how everything ramifies: A branch of some action in Tijuana will mesh with the limbs of Washington's governmental policies. Everything is connected.

Gaghan's new film, Syriana, wants to achieve the same effect by looking at the oil trade, which, as the director has mentioned in interviews, shares much in common with making and marketing drugs. But the results in Syriana are tangled. Everything is again connected, but the plethora of knots holding it all together are often too tough to untie.

That oil dictates much of the world's actions has been apparent since the 1970s, despite the alarming obduracy among certain Westerners to admit that recent bellicose excursions into the Middle East were driven almost solely by an insatiable demand for fuel. Gaghan does understand this, and so his story rightfully ranges widely from the back halls of the Central Intelligence Agency and corporate boardrooms to oil field shantytowns and suburban kitchens.

A dodgy merger between two U.S. oil companies serves as backdrop for more intimate stories. A C.I.A. spook and Middle East specialist, Bob Barnes (George Clooney), is beginning to have doubts about his orders; Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), an oil market expert based in Switzerland, is striving to provide for his wife (Amanda Peet) and two sons; a young Pakistani oil field worker (Mazhar Munir) and his father suddenly find themselves unemployed by their company, one of the corporations in the merger scheme; and an enlightened Arab prince (Alexander Siddig) hopes to take over as king of his country after his father is able to realize some needed liberal reforms (a pleasant science fiction).

All of these lives will come in contact with the others, often tragically. But no one is exempt from harm in the pursuit of oil. Even the new mega-corporation will feel blow-back from having once handed out layoff notices in one of its far-flung fields. The resulting chain of events is as difficult to comprehend by the average person as it is for Texan oil traffickers, who actually have their hands on the levers. All are caught in a self-perpetuating web.

Naturally, this is intriguing material. But Gaghan has over-egged the pudding. There is an endless supply of characters introduced in Syriana with little in the way of development. Put more plainly, some of Gaghan's creations are not humans as much as they are polemical mannequins reciting pat dialogue. Peet's character, for instance, is like a clockwork liberal, spouting feel-good psychobabble while proffering soy bacon to her family. It is also often difficult to know just exactly who some of these people are, and what their relationships to the other characters are based on. The answers are all there, one senses, but it would probably take a second viewing to patch it all together.

Syriana, unfortunately, isn't really worth it, as many parts of the film are just unbearably dull. Even with a raft of good actors — and well-known performers popping up in cameos, as if this were a more serious It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — few of the performances linger in the mind afterward. Clooney's Oscar begins to look like a consolation prize for having created a better film, Good Night and Good Luck, in a year that was full of great films.