SYRIANA

There's this scene in SYRIANA around the two-thirds mark. Matt Damon's character, a wunderkind energy firm analyst, is riding an elevator with a prince who is heir to an unnamed Arab oil emirate. Damon's character has achieved this unfettered access to the king-to-be through both his plucky resolve and his son's timely electrocution in the prince's pool. I can't remember whether the elevator was going up or down, but the hotel rooms cost $20,000 per night, so wherever they were going was an important place. Suddenly the elevator stops and George Clooney's character gets on. He's a little rumpled and heavily bearded in his CIA operative disguise, but he's still plainly the most charismatic man making movies in Hollywood. Clooney's guy says nothing to Damon's guy, but exchanges a few nondescript phrases with the prince. At that moment, I know. I know exactly what's going to happen next. After another moment or two of the elevator descending or ascending the fifty-story hotel, it will stop again. Then Don Cheadle will get on. He will be wearing an emerald green sequined shirt and will be speaking Mandarin. More seemingly insignificant banter will be exchanged, and by the time the elevator reaches the top or bottom, the prince will have been talked into signing over his oil holdings in exchange for nonexistent soybean fields in Illinois and the heroes will be on their way to a helipad. The CON will be ON.

It's strange. I went to see SYRIANA in the middle of making my way a couple of times through the television version of Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. There's no real reason to discuss the two in the same paragraph, but one contrast that occurred to me is too stark not to mention. Bergman's film is a five-hour measurement of the distance between two people and an exercise in creating a complex portrait of two characters and the relationship they couldn't sustain or abandon. In SYRIANA, the only sliver that could pass for character development or detail is the part in which the ambitious lawyer is openly disdainful of his sloppy drunk father in a couple of scenes in the middle of the film, but by the end of the film he has scaled it back to mild resentment.

Perhaps SYRIANA collapses under the weight of its own heft when it decides to separate the various players and assign them various gradations of moral culpability. I suppose that's an arguably necessary device from a conventional storytelling perspective to allow the audience one or two points of entry, but it sets in motion a fairly rote resolution of all those sprawling, interconnected storylines.

For one particular character example, take George Clooney's CIA operative. At the film's beginning, he's a morally ambiguous operator selling missiles to uncertain end-users to further national interests, broadly speaking. I believe, if I understood the labrythine plot correctly, that he was set to assassinate the aforementioned prince. However, he is then provided with a moment of moral clarity which steers him away from the anti-hero path and back onto the straight and narrow role of our moral voice and conscience. His fate is sealed when he meets Christopher Plummer's oil baron character at a diner to confront him. If anything constitutes a beatification in American cinema, it is any moment in which any male lead sticks his finger in any Christopher Plummer character's face and delivers the "Don't fuck with my family" speech. From that instant, he's resolutely the hero, all the more because we're there to watch him fail.

Note, though, that two of the plot points that illustrate Clooney's character's alienation and the ideological inferiority of his opponents are rehashes. Specifically, he discovers that he's being frozen out of the Agency when we see, in real-time, his computer deny him access to information he had just been able to see. Later, while Clooney is on the ground attempting to rescue the prince, we see the high-tech assassination played out from one satellite remove away, in a control room where bureaucrats order missile strikes which show up on computer monitors. I saw two scenes nearly identical to those in a Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movie some years ago. I think it's a safe bet that Tom Clancy and Stephen Gaghan wouldn't write the same position paper on fossil fuels and our national dependence on oil from the Gulf region, but they're using the same narrative language about their character and their government, and that's telling in a way that's hardly flattering to Gaghan's film.

Sure, SYRIANA has the same narrative hallmarks that may have become mainstreamed after Gaghan's own script for TRAFFIC, and the film tries hard to ape the unabashed circa-Watergate political paranoia of films like THE CONVERSATION, THE PARALLAX VIEW and DAY OF THE CONDOR. The problem, though, is that those elements, at least insofar as they are elements of plot and style, have been themselves neutered and mainstreamed into irrelevance. As a result, any outrage or even thoughtful reflection brought about by the film lasts, whether by design or not, only as long as it takes the viewer to get up and walk from the theater out into the parking lot, unlock the car and put the key into the ignition. The film's forgotten by the time the engine is started, because you've got to get home somehow.