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Security & Terrorism

Review: Syriana's heart of darkness

By JASON VEST

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 (UPI) -- When it premiered in 2000, I was prepared to hate the movie "Traffic," simply because I considered the idea of Americanizing the brilliant and innovative British original (the 1989 miniseries "Traffik") to be blasphemy. Though not as smitten with Traffic as most, I was, I admit, pleasantly surprised. There was, of course, no way the standard movie format could allow for the rich character development of the miniseries. But to adapt a Pakistan-Germany-UK scenario to a Mexico-US one while keeping it true to Traffik's spirit and making a well-paced, complex yet accessible two-and-half-hour film, took, I thought, some admirable skill.

For his rendering of the "Traffic" script, writer Stephen Gaghan received a well-deserved Academy Award; after a few more turns pecking out more conventional Hollywood fare (the remake of "The Alamo," a Katie Holmes thriller), Gaghan returns to his Oscar-winning style as both writer and director of "Syriana," a film that endeavors to do with Middle East geo/petro-political intrigue what "Traffic" did with the international narcotics trade. Originally intended to be a film version of CIA veteran Robert Baer's memoir "See No Evil," Gaghan instead chose to merely adapt a few elements of Baer's book and weave them into a much larger, more complicated story.

The good news is that Gaghan has made a thoroughly smart film, one that will be tremendously gratifying as a story for the astute, attentive, and informed viewer. It might also be satisfying for those who choose to engage with it not so much as a story but as a device for conveying how mid-level players in international intrigue feel when they rapidly alternate between moments of sublime clarity and utter confusion as they labor to comprehend the moral ramifications of the hazy game they're in.

But the tempo and subtle clarity that hallmarked "Traffic" are so torn asunder in "Syriana's" tsunami of location/story/character cuts that anyone who does not read The Economist on a regular basis is likely to feel as addled as the drug-addicted kids in "Traffic. "

A brief plot summary of "Syriana": When Prince Nasir al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig), the foreign minister and heir apparent of an unnamed Gulf kingdom, shows American oil company Connex the door in favor of a better deal from a Chinese concern, Connex seeks a new lease on life by merging with Jimmy Pope's (Chris Cooper's) Killen, which has just received lucrative concessions in Kazakstan. Appreciative that the Justice Department will likely take advantage of its merger-approval power to scrutinize the players' past dubious dealings, Connex's outside counsel, Washington power attorney/rainmaker Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), tasks ambitious up-and-coming attorney Bennet Holliday (Jeffrey Wright) with the deal's due diligence.

CIA officer Bob Barnes (George Clooney), meanwhile, is stewing and skulking around Langley; while his latest mission (to Tehran, where he blows up two Iranian arms dealers) was a technical success, he's troubled that his bosses don't care that one of the missiles he sold to his targets was re-sold on the spot to a mysterious blue-eyed Egyptian. In Geneva, meanwhile, financial analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) and his family get a business/pleasure trip to the Emir Hamed al-Subaai's estate in Marbella, Spain, where his firm hopes Damon will score a contract to advise the al-Subaais. Instead, one of Damon's sons meets a tragic, accidental demise in a swimming pool -- an event that later gets a Damon a personal meeting with Nasir, who wanly seeks to ameliorate Damon's grief by granting his company the contract. Initially appalled ("How much for my other kid?" Damon asks), Damon and Siddig quickly realize they share the same secular, modernizing vision for Siddig's country.

But Nasir's idiot playboy younger brother Meshal (Akbar Kurtha) has just come of age, and on his 21st birthday gets a visit from the Mephistophelean Whiting, who reminds Meshal that his firm has long tended to his father's interests, and that Meshal's decadent ways will only last if the status quo of his country is maintained. (Modus operandi: Meshal, not Nasir, as the next king, with Connex-Killen there as job security.)

Back in Washington, the U.S. government has concluded that Nasir's Connex decision has made him an unreliable future US ally, so the CIA dispatches Barnes to Beirut. His mission: Set up a hit on the visiting Nasir, using Mussawi, apparent former CIA case officer who went seriously native some time ago. Unfortunately for Barnes, it turns out Mussawi is working for the Iranians, and instead of hitting Nasir, he first kidnaps and tortures Barnes, and then blows his cover. Barnes' bosses decide to cast him as a rogue officer, and once back at Langley he enters a province of Kafkaesque pariah-hood as everyone from the FBI to CIA inspector general investigates him.

Holiday, meanwhile, continues to find evidence that everyone involved in the merger is somehow dirty, and tries to gauge just how many sacrificial lambs it'll take to satisfy Justice Department lawyer Donald Farrish (David Clennon) to get the deal approved. Half a world away Woodman's family life is going to hell in a handbasket; half a city away Barnes is meeting with old colleague Stan (William Hurt) to get the skinny on why he's been scapegoated.

As all these plot lines have been unspooling, so, too, has the relative secularism of Wasim and Farrooq (Mazhar Munir and Sonnell Dadral), two young, out-of-work Pakistani guestworkers in the al-Subaai emirate, who have been drawn to the radical Islamist preachings of that blue-eyed Egyptian Barnes saw in Tehran.

One doesn't need to be an intelligence, legal or financial analyst to conclude that how all of this ends up won't be pretty. Nor does one need to be a professional film critic to see it as a muddle that's by turns glorious and maddening. The issues, locales and archetypes Gaghan endeavors to explore are among the most important of our time; and in America, a country whose entertainment-consuming population is exceptionally travel- and thought-averse, something like "Syriana" is about as close as many will ever get to experiencing the Middle East, and the shades of character and policy that define their government's relationship with it.

How the average American theatergoer finds it will be interesting to see, especially if the people I saw it with at a special screening in Washington are any indicator. Accompanying me were one of Washington's most able investigative chroniclers of U.S. foreign policy and national security; an international political economist; and a 39-year CIA veteran -- people, in other words, who's real, daily lives are reflected in Syriana's milieu and complexity. And even they had trouble following it.

Indeed, the spook among us thought it "sclerotic," and not just because a number of extraneous subplot lines gum up the works (Wright's struggles with an alcoholic father, Clooney's estrangement from his family, Damon's estrangement from his -- indeed, the Damon character could go entirely). It's also because a handful of other ancillary strands leave the viewer wanting, in the name of both entertainment and clarity. Frustratingly, we're not cut in on Mussawi's secret history. The "Committee to Liberate Iran" -- an Iraqi National Congress-type group agitating for regime change -- looks like it could have been fun, but its appearances are fleeting. Plummer's scant screen time minimizes both a great turn, and appreciation for his role as the film's Moriarity. And as Roger Tamraz analog, Tim Blake Nelson makes the most of limited screen time with a couple of cynically comic, over-the-top soliloquies -- but by the second time his character reappears, one could be excused for struggling to remember what he was doing there in the first place.

And while Gaghan says he conceived Syriana as an antidote to such classic 70's-era political thrillers as Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, with their disappointing, contrived deus ex machina conclusions ("It's the military-industrial complex!"; "It's the CIA!"; "It's Big Oil!"), one's a bit hard pressed to see this as much different. Here, everything, in one way, shape or form, gets back to the interests of the oil companies, whose interests are often commensurate with U.S. foreign policy; while elements of the CIA, law firms, or the Justice Department may think they're doing something independent, useful, or noble, in Syriana, any sense of agency they have is an illusion, any utility ultimately a means to someone else's end.

That's fine, especially as it's a much more sophisticated, eloquently gritty deus ex machina, and because among Gaghan's intrinsic talents includes a knack for channeling other great, protracted excursions in intrigue like "Traffic," HBO's short-lived "K Street" and the old BBC Le Carre adaptations (Gaghan's even makes a nod to the latter in a scene that ends with Plummer sardonically asking Clooney, "Beirut rules?"). Indeed, considering those influences, I found myself fantasizing about what Syriana if it were either spread out over 12 hours a la HBO's "The Wire," or if it had been pared down to something like "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold," arguably an older, distant relative to Syriana (its hard to watch Clooney's Barnes and not think of Alec Lemas) that adroitly covered similar ground in a much shorter run time.

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Jason Vest is a staff correspondent for the magazine Government Executive and a contributor to National Journal and the Village Voice. His writing on national security has also appeared in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Boston Phoenix and Mother Jones. He lives in Washington, DC.

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