I've Got To See This Movie!

'Syriana' thrills, stays a mystery

Bruce Newman
Mercury News
Published: Friday, December 9, 2005


"Syriana'' is a movie that requires your full attention for every bit of its two-plus hours, and even that is not enough. Watching this petroleum-based thriller is like being at a crowded party and trying to listen in on somebody else's conversation. You keep straining to understand the bits and pieces of information that you can make out, but it still adds up to a lot less than the sum of its parts.

The parts are pretty good. ``Syriana'' has great seriousness of purpose and fine acting, but its stories are so confusingly set forth, and their meanings so elliptical, that it never comes together as a movie. The picture is often gripping, but it is rarely dramatic. In fact, it is anti-dramatic: We arrive at scenes late, overhear characters we don't know talking about things we don't understand. Then it's off to the next muttered shards of inexplicable dialogue.

If any of the film's four main story lines -- each with its own cast of characters -- were allowed to build for a length of time exceeding the five-minute tripwire inserted by writer-director Stephen Gaghan, we might have some sense of investment, or at least involvement, in their lives. We don't.

When the child of one of the main characters dies tragically at the estate of an Arabian oiligarch, it actually turns out to be a convenient form of business networking, and that's all the emotional weight the movie gives it. Gaghan, who wrote a similar script for ``Traffic'' in 2000, lacks the visual storytelling sense that Steven Soderbergh brought to that picture. In ``Syriana'' (a title he never bothers to explain), Gaghan drains the drama from almost every scene, preferring to spread it around the surface of the globe, like an oil slick.

Occasionally, a gusher erupts, bathing the characters around it in the grease and grit of good drama. At one point, a character (played by Tim Blake Nelson), whose role in the story is never clearly explained, has just such a moment, and it seems to express the movie's conspiratorial ethos. I present it here because, delightful as Nelson's delivery of the speech is, I have no idea what it means:

``Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation . . . We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the street. Corruption is why we win.''

Anybody?

The movie's multiple story lines do intersect at times, usually when we are following the movements of veteran CIA field operative Bob Barnes (George Clooney). Bob sells booby-trapped Stinger missiles to terrorists on the Arab street, and orders up assassinations of regimes deemed unfriendly to what one character delightfully refers to as ``the petroleum security of the United States.'' If you need to know where to go for a manicure in Beirut, don't ask Bob.

Here are some of Bob's friends:

• Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig), the first member of an Arab royal family to favor giving women the vote, holding parliamentary elections and exporting his country's oil to China instead of the United States. For that last little faux pas, the CIA has labeled him a terrorist.

• Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), an American derivatives trader based in Geneva who becomes a close ally of Nasir's after repeatedly telling the Oxford-educated heir to the throne what a knucklehead he is. Woodman is trying to help Nasir win a succession derby with his feckless brother, who is the ``cat's paw'' of American business interests, as represented by . . .

• Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), head of a powerful Washington lobbying firm that is running interference for a merger between oil giant Connex and a smaller Texas company run by ruthless wildcatter Jimmy Pope (Chris Cooper). Jimmy's prized drilling rights to fields in Kazakhstan have attracted the unwanted attention of prosecutors in the Justice Department.

• Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) is plugging holes in the deal for Whiting to make sure the merger goes through. Whenever Bennett returns to his home in Washington, D.C., his father is waiting for him on the stoop, usually either drunk, smoking, or disapproving of everything his son stands for. This is a subplot that goes nowhere, a character development that reveals nothing. As with so much of ``Syriana,'' the expectation seems to be: You figure it out.

`Syriana'

**

Rated R (violence and profanity)

Cast George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Siddig, Chris Cooper, Christopher Plummer, William Hurt, Tim Blake Nelson

Writer-director Stephen Gaghan (suggested by the book ``See No Evil'' by Bob Baer)

Running time 2 hours, 6 minutes

Contact Bruce Newman at www.mercextra.com/bnewman or call (408) 920-5004.