Word: syriana
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Successful movie are, it's said, the ones whose story and appeal can be expressed in a single sentence. To summarize Syriana, writer-director Stephen Gaghan's drama about petro-politics, you would need a book the size of The 9/11 Commission Report. Hopscotching across the globe, packing enough plots for half a dozen thrillers, refusing easy judgments of its characters, the film has a worldview that is mature, synoptic, careworn--light-years from the standard Hollywood movie. The closest we can get to pegging Syriana in a phrase: it's smart...
...plot, rather, plots are wholly invented and the names have been changed. Clooney's character is called Bob Barnes, although his expertise and undercurrent of melancholy are pure Baer. (Barnes' prodigiously sarcastic son Robby is modeled on Charlotte Baer.) But the fruits of Gaghan's research are obvious. Syriana's characters--from would-be Arab princes to American oil traders, CIA agents to terrorists--behave in exquisitely detailed and complicated ways. They cross paths and challenge one another's assumptions, just as Gaghan's were challenged. Of course, Syriana is entertainment first and foremost. It just happens to feel true...
...9/11--when seeing anything other than evil behind terrorism got Bill Maher and Susan Sontag lambasted--there was a limited audience in the U.S. for complex terrorists. But four years and a controversial war later, a few works are starting to hang flesh on those stick villains. In addition to Syriana and Sleeper Cell, there's The War Within, a film about a plan to blow up New York City's Grand Central Terminal, and Paradise Now, about Palestinian suicide bombers. Salman Rushdie has taken up the subject in his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown...
Perhaps because of the tricky moral ground--and the potential for bolstering stereotypes--those terrorism scripts include sympathetic Muslims as audience surrogates. In Syriana there is a reformist Arab prince; in War Within, Hassan's childhood friend Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), an assimilated suburban dad, doesn't understand why Hassan can't leave his anger and piety back in the Old World. In its sweeping, 24-like thriller plot, Sleeper Cell depicts a wide range of extremists but also Darwyn (Michael Ealy), a devout Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates the cell and sees its members as foes of Islam...
...murders a U.S. ambassador, but it's less a political act than payback for a personal betrayal. Often U.S. actions play a role. War Within's Hassan is radicalized after American agents snatch him in Paris as a terrorism suspect and send him to Pakistan to be tortured. In Syriana a young Pakistani immigrant can't find work in a rich Persian Gulf nation, so he joins an extremist madrasah, but the movie's sprawling story also faults the U.S. for supporting corrupt, oil-rich despots...