Buckeye Road

What Is the Price of Oil?

You hear that question a heck of a lot in the promos for Syriana.

However, it's a question the movie doesn't answer.

To be fair, I didn't like Traffic -- the American theatrical film version, penned by Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed Syriana. (The original British miniseries, and even the American miniseries, are much, much better.) There is more to film storytelling than having a lot of different things happening in succession -- and an audience needs more to tell characters apart than different color palettes for each story line.

Having lots of storylines isn't necessarily a problem. Crash was able to pull this off quite successfully earlier this year, although perhaps this is an unfair comparison, because Crash cut through to the emotional cores of its characters.

The actors in Syriana are not so much playing characters as embodying position papers, archetypes of various cogs in the military-industrial complex. Gaghan has big things to say about the big picture, and the primary focus is not the characters' humanity, but their politics.

As in Traffic, there are small touches to suggest that these are in fact people with some kind of personal stakes. George Clooney's middle-aged CIA agent has an earnest yet disappointed son. Jeffrey Wright's corporate fixer has an alcoholic father. Tragedy befalls Matt Damon's energy analyst's young family.

These shadings are, for the most part, incidental to Gaghan's big message, which is all about how the U.S. government and U.S. megacorporations may have their minor legal squabbles, but they are united in one goal: controlling the world's supply of oil, which these days means controlling the Middle East.

Now, here's where things start to get confusing, because the picture also seems to endorse the idea that the U.S. (for reasons that are not entirely clear or logical) benefits from having disorder in the Middle East. So we're controlling them, but we also want there to be disorder . . .

Gaghan's logic (or, rather, that of his position paper-characters) might leave you thinking that the U.S. and its corporate honchos are less than competent. However, in Syriana, they are, for the most part, astonishingly effective at manipulating each other and, most importantly, of course (to Gaghan's big message) at manipulating the Middle East.

[Now I'm going to say a few things about the ending -- stop reading if you don't want to know of it yet.]

I saw the film last Saturday afternoon, opening weekend here, and the theater was surprisingly packed with adults -- lots in their 40s and 50s. When the lights came up at the end, as we shuffled out, a lot of people were talking.

Before Gaghan delights, they were not talking about his big message. Rather, they were discussing how confusing the movie was. There are so many characters, so many scenes of action, that it is difficult to keep up. Then, all of a sudden, someone launches into a big speech -- Matt Damon's analyst, in particular, tended to bring things into focus -- and you tend to nod and go, of course that's right.

I can't help thinking of the tagline used to advertise Magnolia -- it will all make sense in the end -- because, here, little does. Shut out and shut down by the CIA, George Clooney concocts an elaborate scheme to get Christopher Plummer to bring him back online, and somehow Clooney then manages to travel to the unnamed Middle Eastern country where the prince Matt Damon is advising is about to have his caravan hit by a CIA missile. (The prince would throw the Americans out to democratize his country on its own terms, and so the CIA would rather kill him and let his pliable brother take over.)

How does Clooney know this is about to happen? How does he know, as he gets out of his car and consults a map, where the prince's caravan is? Visually, the sequence is exciting, but seen from anything less than a tight shot it makes no sense.

When Clooney stops the caravan, confronted by the prince's guards, the prince recognizes him in the moment before the missile obliterates them both. "You're the Canadian," the prince says. Of course, this is a false recognition, since Clooney lied to the prince when they rode in the same elevator earlier in the film, in Beirut. Clooney was in fact there to oversee the prince's abduction and murder.

Even more maddening is yet another story line, focusing on a young Pakistani oil field worker and his doddering father, who are deprived of their jobs, then ruthlessly beaten down for the offense of talking while standing in line to renew their work permits.

The young man and his friend are easy prey for the blue-eyed Egyptian (who Clooney sells a contraband weapon in the film's first scene). He plays soccer with them, hangs out with them for several very homoerotic moments before taking them to the local madrassah for lessons in how the West is decadent and to blame for all their problems.

I was hoping that the film would end with him blowing up Jeffrey Wright and Chris Cooper in their smarmy story line, but no such luck. Instead, Gaghan has them heading out in a flock of fishing boats, veering away from the pack and toward an enormous oil processing facility on the water, as the young Pakistani spreads himself out over the weapon, barely concealed under a fishing net.

There is a moment of haunting beauty -- helped by the score -- as the young man is almost soaring against the light sky until the moment of impact, at which point the film fades to white. The aftermath of the attack is never shown.

What is the point of writing about suicide bombing if you don't deal with the consequences? In life, there is never anything so pure and clean as a fade to white. What is visually stunning here is morally and emotionally dishonest. I stress the emotional as well as the moral because Gaghan's overreaching film leaves the experience of the young Pakistani man -- the deeper psychological, emotional experience of this particular character -- completely inscrutable.

In the young man's entire appearance in the film, no one speaks English. Everything is subtitled. Now, this is realistic, of course, but it makes his experience all the more foreign to those of us (surely some 99% of the film's audience) who don't speak his language.

This challenge could be overcome through incisive writing and directing, by drawing out why this particular young man is susceptible, the struggle he undergoes -- it's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine at least an intense inner struggle, especially as he did not appear to be particularly observant of his faith in the early part of the film.

Instead, Gaghan gives us a paint-by-numbers story of how Islamist radicalization works, no doubt well backed up by crib notes taken from various articles in The New Yorker. The point is not that the story line is not factually accurate, or possible; the point is that Gaghan has forsaken humanity for process. He razzle-dazzles with the machine, but the only rage he supplies is his own.

The most fitting moment in the movie comes in the corporate corridors of power, when Jeffrey Wright sells out the high-powered lawyer he's been apprenticed to in order to seal the megamerger. Even this is very Glengarry Glen Ross -- except at a Hyatt -- and with a black guy!

I take Gaghan's point about capitalism always moving forward, always crushing the competition. He took my money. So let's call it even.

posted by BT @ 11:40 PM