PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/23/05)

Can a two-hour fictional narrative film correct several decades’ worth of misinformation and propaganda about this country’s relation to the Middle East and its most precious asset? Writer-director Steven Gaghan thinks it’s worth a shot, and with Syriana (“suggested by” See No Evil, a War-on-Terror-from-the-inside-out book by former CIA field officer Robert Baer), he crafts a multi-story-line thriller not dissimilar to his script for Traffic. Jeffrey Wright plays a high-powered lawyer whose background of family dysfunction has imbued him with enough ambition that he can leap multiple ethical hurdles in a single bound; bearded and burly George Clooney, a CIA op whose loyalties take a shift once he gloms that he’s been hung out to dry; Matt Damon, an economic analyst who picks a plum gig out of a personal tragedy, earning a place by the side of a future emir; and Mazhar Munir, a sort of Middle East migrant worker whose ultimate disenfranchisement leads him to the bosom of—you’ll never guess—a group of Islamic radicals. The stories are all densely packed with detail and convincingly told.

Perhaps too convincingly told. At a time when “My Country, Right or Wrong” has for many morphed into “My country, right by definition,” and people trot out God-is-on-our-side justifications for all manner of slaughter, it’s pretty ballsy of these moviemakers to posit the confluence of Big Oil and Big Government in this country as some kind of, um, Great Satan. And it is the fact that Syriana takes things as far as it does, and no farther, that makes it an uncomfortable film to think about. I won’t even get into the fact that for this movie’s purposes Israel might as well be located in Dutchess County. Let’s say for the sake of argument that we take everything the movie is saying at face value. How might we viewers, who have been enlightened by Syriana, go about putting an end to the corruption and exploitation that the movie so deplores? Syriana depicts a system so thoroughly and intractably rotten that the standard liberal how-you-can-make-a-difference solutions—being more conscientious about using electricity, getting a hybrid car, and so on—only look like so much spit in the face of an atomic fireball. If this way of doing business in the Middle East has got to go, who’s going to get rid of it? Do we elect better leaders? Sure, that works every time. Start a revolution? Um, hey, wait a minute . . .

The system that this movie so deplores, after all, fuels—among other things—the movie industry and its various satellites (of which this magazine is one). How much do Syriana’s filmmakers want us to give up? How much are they willing to give up? Or is this movie just another “we wanted to get the debate going” bromide?

These misgivings might not have stuck so hard in my craw had Syriana bothered to address precisely how implicated its own creation is in the situation it purports to blow the lid off. But there’s the rub—conventional narrative filmmaking isn’t very good at that sort of thing. That’s why director Jean-Luc Godard, to whom the issue of implication is vital, has been hammering away at that form over the past several decades. I wouldn’t expect Gaghan and company to emulate Godard—have you seen the guy’s box office numbers lately?—but I still feel they’re ducking the issue. I would hate to think that these moviemakers understand exactly what they’re saying, and are counting on the fact that it won’t make a fig’s worth of difference. Or am I placing an unfair burden on the movie? If I am, that might count as some sort of testament to Syriana’s effectiveness.—Glenn Kenny