Going to see a good movie with family and friends this Thanksgiving or Christmas? Well, don't see this one. Wait for it on DVD it will work just fine there. Here is Heloise's film review of "Lions For Lambs." I was not too thrilled by it. Originally published at Blogcritics.org.
Heloise AKA Dinner With da Vinci
TV talk shows featuring the three stars of Lions For Lambs: Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise piqued great interest in their new film. However, I found Lions For Lambs lame to put it simply, or, a rip-off to put it rudely. Redford and Cruise had the perfect vehicle to air the dirty laundry of the politics of war. Instead Redford oversimplifies a red-hot-button issue into a uniform, neatly folded stack of clothes that the average audience will not unfold and wear.
Lions For Lambs had been the hype, by the right, to be a hot-button-issue movie. Why? because Redford made this movie and clearly adds his two cents to the Iraq War quagmire. He also displays disdain for the military plans and planners behind the war. I think the great métier for this movie would be to give back and to give credit and power where it was due, to activists, online, on the streets, and in makeshift camps outside ranches, when and where America was searching its political soul. Those people are not represented in this movie. And I predict won’t care about Lions For Lambs ultimately lame message.
I anticipate a place where the right and left wing could safely face off, stand up, sit down, chat up, and debate the issues with no holds barred. I look for revelation and instead get strong opinion about something Americans are steaming mad about: the War on Terror. Yes, we are mad, yes, we do care. So why couldn't these three gifted stars deliver a movie where we could feel this anger? They did try, but Lions for Lambs is not that movie. Though its tri-member high-power cast make it watchable, the sets are sterile, staged, unreal, uninviting, and the message watered-down.
This movie was really three well-acted stories with six characters. But, in the end, it boils down to six talking heads. Robert Redford directs and plays the composite caring professor (Stephen Malley), of what we are not sure, perhaps politics, perhaps philosophy. Streep plays the composite caring Jewish veteran journalist (Janine Roth). Cruise plays the uncaring, composite, pompous GOP senator from Illinois (Jasper Irving). And the third story involves Malley’s two former students, one black, one Latino.
The Senator/journalist story (interview) is set in Washington, D.C. It also offers the best example of this movie’s sterility. It comes in the form of missing props. Would you believe that Janine Roth arrived to interview Senator Irving and walked into his office alone and empty handed? There were no visible recording devices, no microphones, no handlers, no cameras, not even a computer. And most of all no explanation as to why these tools of the trade were missing. She sits down and takes shorthand notes from a senator who really seems to be the commander-in-chief. He is unexpectedly called to another room for some high-level brief while Roth (Streep) left to snoop his swank D.C. senate suite. She surveys the pictures on the wall, they tell all. However, I can’t fault the Streep/Cruise repartee and interview, while strangely devoid of technology, is pretty good. Especially when Tom turns the tables on Streep during the interview: He begins to ask the good questions. Specifically, "Don't you want to win the war?" He stands and postures over her. He acts superior in every way, why doesn’t she simply capitulate?
If within their heated exchanges we find philosophy for the movie, then where is its heart? It is found in the lives of two minority students who enlisted into the army 'beast." And whose predictable endings are suppose to drive home the point: "look who's dying in your stead!" But these deaths are shamelessly play like trump cards pulled from Redford's Utah Sundance Tarot deck.
Their story told mostly in flashback by Prof. Malley and an apathetic white male slacker and college student. A conversation that takes place in Malley’s cluttered California university office. The teacher tries calmly, for one hour, to convince his failing student how he could have a better, or a worse life. He uses two former students as metaphor. The audience should (in a 90-minute span) care about the war on terror, an apathetic white student and two minority students—it is simply too much to expect. There is not enough time devoted to who these men (heroes?) were: Why did they enlist in the army in the first place? Why did they traded a cozy college niche for cold battle? Why are these two fired up about the war and the white students not? Anti-war stances, apathy, dying for one’s country, standing for something, and other issues get bantered between Malley and student. They never explore them to any great depth.
We see bits and pieces of how the soldiers get hardened for combat. The climax comes "Sundance style" when the black soldier jumps out of the helicopter after the Latino soldier (wounded) falls out accidently during unexpected fire exchange with the Taliban. But other than that just what did Malley’s former students do during the war? Well, they talk a lot for one thing: Talk in the chopper before battle, talk during a flashback class presentation (it stank). Then predictably they talk (even though half-dead from injury) before dying together on a cold, craggy outpost in Afghanistan. I really want to run out and go shopping just three minutes into the film, because I feel a bunch of talking preachy nonsense coming on (how right I was).
Honestly, this is all well-intended emotional bait. But meaning what? Meaning that we will not win the war against terrorism and the Taliban because we [read America] are not honest, or because we are dishonest in our reporting or coverage of the war? I am not really sure what I am to believe, feel or think about this 90-minute exercise in existential fatalism. I have to give the film a shaky B+ for acting, effort, organization, theme and presentation. But for holding my interest, I have to give it a solid D for dull and dreary.