Thursday, April 24, 2008
Shot High and Missed: Lions for Lambs
For some unknown reason, given myself the task of making sure I touch bases with all the war on terror films that have been coming out of the studios lately. And there have been some nice surprises. DePalma's Redacted attemped an interesting perspective stylistically. In the Valley of the Elah was a moving experience.
Lions for Lambs has a very strange trichotomy going on. Meryl Streep is trying to be sold a new approach to Afghanistan by a Republican stick in his ass Senator played by Tom Cruise. Robert Redford is getting in a student's face about not being socially active and two others of Redford's students (an Hispanic and an African American) who made a choice about quitting studies in social policy joined Special Forces instead are caught on a murky and unrealistic soundstage getting their butts blown off by rebels trying to secure the "high ground" (double meaning slammed over our heads) while green screen survielence of the screen takes place in HQ miles away.
The bad movie set mountain top action of the two college buddies running out of blood, ammo and time is actually a relief from the heavy speechy dialog going on in Cruise's or Redford's office. Here is a full example of one of Redford's speeches to his slacker student.
"World War I, German soldiers wrote poems about the bravery of British grunts, admired them, almost as much as they laughed at the British high command who wasted thos same grunts by the hundreds of thousands. German general wrote, "Nowhere else I have seen such lions led by such lambs." Gosh, that statement is so dead on right now. These startched collars that started this war, that are running it now, nowhere near the best and the brightest, not even in the same galaxy. They're the ones when our men are blown to bits in the middle of a gun battle, say shit like, "The enemy may have bloodied our nose, but we're learning from our mistakes."
But he is just winding up for his big finish two or three intercuts later...
"Rome is burning's son. And the problem is not with the people that started this. They're past irredemable. The problem is with us. All of us. Who do nothing. Who just fiddle. Who try to maneuver around the edges of the flames. And I'll tell you something, there are people out there, day to day, all over the world who are fighting to make things better."
Earnestness is a great value. But unfortunately, when it goes unchecked in an agenda ridden 90 minute film the result can not be satisfactory. Ironically, screen writer Matthew Michael Carnahan wrote one of the best war on terror films to come out recently, The Kingdom which had the premise of a police procedural in Saudi Arabia, with lots of wonderful opportunity to investigate cultural differences and conflicts. In one of the film promotional extras, Carnahan said the motivation for this film came when he saw a crawler headline about Humvee accident in Iraq while channel surfing while watching a football game. It later became his motivation for the story -- our pursuit for entertainment while folks are fighting, a lack of involvement at the citizenry level. One can't deny that this is a noble starting point.
Ultimately, Lions for Lambs and its intentions gets derailed by all the talk intersected by an unconvincing action sequence. It came out in November and disappeared before Thanksgivng was over. I am all for serious films that aim high, but Lions shows that this can be a very difficult task to do successfully.
posted by well-executed buffet at 9:08 PM
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