Movie Review: Lions for Lambs (2007)

Categorized | Gary Karbon, movies

Movie Review: Lions for Lambs (2007)

Posted on 22 April 2008 by Gary Karbon

At the most fundamental level, a movie has to decide whether it’s a documentary or a dramatic work. We also have to decide whether we want to watch an educational, didactic film or a work of dramatic fiction.

Lions for Lambs fails on both levels. It’s neither one nor the other. It lectures through drama, but without teaching anything new.

Despite strong writing, directing and brilliant acting, it maintains a split-personality. It’s a film about war on terror that might have served its purpose better if delivered as a Political Science paper or a New York Times Magazine cover story.

But the thing is, that Poli-Sci paper or NYT article has been done already, more than once. We already know every single argument pushed forward in this film directed by Robert Redford and written by Matthew Michael Carnahan.

Thus not only its endless talking-heads sequences violate the main tenets of telling a story through “motion pictures,” but it also fails to enrich our understanding of the national predicament by saying something that we have not heard before.

Here is the “main message”: poor kids with superior ethics go and die in the hell of Iraq and Afghanistan fighting for us while rich kids kick back, enjoy themselves to death with all kinds of silly diversions on college campuses and thus become complicit in the national tragedy. Why? Because they choose the easy path out and eschew their responsibilities to become more engaged in the national political process.

Please tell me you haven’t heard that one before!

The film is structured as three parallel exchanges (technically, “sequences”) taking place simultaneously in real time but in totally different contexts, all tied to one another within the general context of war in Afghanistan.

Exchange 1: Veteran journalist Janine Roth (played by Meryl Streep The Divine) is invited to the young and upcoming Republican Senator Jasper Irving’s office (played by a sharp-as-ever Tom Cruise) for an official leak on the latest and baddest military campaign about to be unleashed in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Exchange 2: Professor Stephen Malley (brought to life by Robert Redford who is aging better than any French wine) is fencing ideas in his office with, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), one of the smartest students that ever passed from his lecture hall. Malley is trying to shake Hayes out of his complacency. Hayes returns the favor by reminding the professor the hypocrisy of it all.

Exchange 3: A night-time U.S. Special Forces ambush on a godforsaken mountain top in Afghanistan. The squad carried by a transport chopper comes under heavy fire (thanks to faulty military intelligence). While they try to evade enemy fire, private Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Peña) falls off the chopper. And incredibly, his buddy Lt. Arian Finch (Derek Luke) dives after him WITHOUT a parachute! Incredible as it may seem, both survive the fall and live to fight the Taliban forces closing in on them.

Background: both Ernest and Arian were in Prof. Malley’s poli-sci class. While the rest of their classmates were thinking to advance their careers and make a lot of money, the two buddies shocked both their friends and Prof. Malley by signing up with the Army in order to do the “right thing.”

The irony of it all is that Redford also makes it clear that Arian and Ernest’s sacrifice does not change a darn thing back in Washington. There, in the capital of the nation, politics and journalism business continue to prosper as usual.

The film ends with the same split personality that it starts. At the end we still have not learned a new way to approach the deadlock and solve it. We are also not even sure if any effort is worth it to begin with.

Lions for Lambs makes sense only as an artistic witness to a depressing time in history when America did not know how to back out of a controversial war in which crucial mistakes were made by more than one parties involved.

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