Syriana

Synopsis: Robert Baer (George Clooney) who investigates terrorists around the globe is a 21-year veteran of the CIA. Increasingly disillusioned with the CIA’s preoccupation with protecting oil rather than people, the struggle becomes personal when an oil executive (Matt Damon) and his wife (Amanda Peet) are faced with a family tragedy.

Well, that’s essentially the synopsis on the promotional flier. Which is largely incorrect. But to really understand what the film’s truly about would require a near-miraculous disentanglement of the drip-feed of quasi-fictional geopolitical gobbledygook and concatenation of multiple parallel story threads that is writer-director Stephen Gaghan's Oscar-nominated script. Gaghan did pull off a good script to win an Oscar for Traffic (Steven Soderbergh the director of that film is a producer here). Here he achieves complexity but not lucidity.

Syriana is about the volatile mix of oil and politics. It is a big social issue film with plenty of big drama (cued by lots of big music). The production quality is high. The actors are good. The director and producer team have a huge amount of talent between them but for me Gaghan's film is an unsuccessful blend of political critique and personal drama that is over-reliant on jargon and Machievellian manoeuverings and omits to clearly identify half the key players. Oddly we often have no clear idea about what the lead character, Robert Baer, is up to, who he’s talking to, or why he does what he does in the closing moments of the film. William Hurt wanders onscreen occasionally like a ghostly presence and chats to him, and then wanders off, leaving us none the wiser. They are only two of the many partly-drawn characters. Unlike Clooney's own Good Night, and Good Luck, which is comprehensible despite a relative lack of backstory, this convolution is crying out for some explication.

The few story threads that aren’t confusing are the ones that are relatively simplistic or sentimental. One individual (Matt Damon) is motivated by a personal tragedy (even though the film had to break the laws of physics to make it happen). Another undergoes a swift conversion from compliant oil worker to suicide bomber. An Arab prince wants the best for his nation but is hampered by an indifferent father figure and a nasty brother. But there are also lots of meetings between characters who end up being no more than ciphers for big business, bureaucratic cynicism, political ambition, integrity and so on.

Whilst it wants in terms of characterisation and immediacy and relies overmuch on emotively-charged broad strokes, Syriana does provide glimpses of a fundamentally disturbing reality.  Although I found it a deeply frustrating experience I’m sure some people, conspiracy theorists especially, will love this.

 

 

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