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Silencing the lions

Redford's film is undone by its own passion
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 14th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Point counterpoint. Streep and Cruise standing here on the sides they represent.
Lions for Lambs

Directed by Robert Redford
With Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Michael Pena, Andrew Garfield and Derek Luke

Robert Redford’s new film Lions for Lambs will not date well, and that’s probably as Redford wants it. Lions is both screed and cri de coeur, its passion and urgency solely directed at the present moment rather than at future cinephiles. It’s at times stilted and tendentious, and yet dares to be what most American films studiously avoid being — serious and committed.
Everything ramifies in Lions for Lambs; the personal is very much political. Three stories intersect within an hour, give or take some spillover and three flashbacks. Late morning in Washington, D.C., journalist Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) arrives at the office of Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise), who wants to give Roth an exclusive on a new military campaign in Afghanistan.
Though a Republican, Irving has a certain fondness for the liberal Roth, as she once wrote a flattering profile of him suggesting that the then-tyro conservative could be the future of his party.
As the two discuss this new stratagem, the very operation in question is being implemented in northern Afghanistan. A military helicopter is transporting soldiers into the frozen Hindu Kush when it suddenly comes under attack by Taliban mortar shells and machine-gun fire. A few of the soldiers are instantly killed, while one, Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Pena) falls out of the hatch. His best friend, Arian Finch (Derek Luke), regardless of the incredible danger, jumps out after him.
At the same moment, Professor Stephen Malley (Redford) is meeting with one of his students, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield). Malley had early pegged Todd as one of his most promising students, though recently the young man has been failing to attend lectures.
Malley’s specialty is political science, and he’s a man driven by social consciousness. In Todd he finds a committed apathist — a young man who has seen how politics works, and opted for hedonic slothfulness instead.
If the young senator’s mission is to sell a new war strategy to the press (one that is failing as he speaks), Malley’s mission is to talk Todd back from the anomie that’s fallen over their broken promised land, and to convince him that to stand for something is always noble, regardless of outcome. Further, he wants to convince Todd that his cynical shrugs over America are, in ’60s parlance, part of the problem rather than the solution.
To make his point, Malley tells Todd of two former students who felt the need to engage with the world they were confronted with, and who joined the army — a choice that the Vietnam-vet professor regrets on a political basis, but one he respects for its bravery. Malley’s students are, of course, the injured and frozen Rodriguez and Finch, lost in the Hindu Kush.
Other than the Afghani battle scenes, Lions for Lambs is classic, rhetorical duodrama: a protagonist and antagonist engaged in debate. The film’s discourses are factious, though occasionally spacious, but the characters cannot always avoid becoming polemical pawns.
The primary problem is with Streep and Cruise’s scenes, particularly at the beginning, where writer Matthew Michael Carnahan’s dialogue is so much swapped boilerplate. But Redford and Carnahan (who also wrote The Kingdom) try to be scrupulously fair, never making Cruise’s Irving a complete Machiavel. Indeed, when he’s notified later in the hour that the mission is souring, he moves from the set senatorial lexicon of weasel words to offer plausible eloquence for the war.
Streep comes alive back at work when she lashes into her editor, a sad, sold-out Lou Grant figure, for the press’s negligence in the buildup to the various wars.
There are a number of holes in Redford’s film. The soldiers’ tale, complete with surviving falls from the sky and miraculous landings mere feet from each other, is embarrassingly contrived. Also, it’s never explained how Streep’s Roth can be a powerful journalist of both print and electronic media.
Redford’s own scenes with Garfield carry the most bite and resonance. The student will be profoundly stung by his professor’s words, and will see the world and his place in it more clearly.
In portraying this world, Redford does an excellent job of letting televisions run in the background, where scenes of America’s hunger for inane star news and gladiatorial games are juxtaposed with screens filled with weather disasters.
However flawed and rambling Lions for Lambs is, it still manages to salvage some of America’s intelligence and honor from its own flawed hour.
    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (14/11/2007):

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