Syriana

Stephen Gaghan, writer of Soderbergh’s Traffic, gets to direct his own script here, and does well by his globe-spanning, densely-populated story which straddles the line between thriller and documentary. You know it is the product of research, that he has gone to those scenes and met those people, and recorded the dialogue almost verbatim within a fictionalized construct. This to me is a million times more real and effective than Fahrenheit 911, for example, in revealing the global politics and economics of oil and neo-colonialism. George Clooney is the grizzled, paunchy CIA operative who needs to come in out of the heat, before one of his own missles seeks him out. Matt Damon is a go-go energy trader who gets in over his head. Chris Cooper is a CEO engineering a huge oil company merger, and bribing his way to energy concessions in the volatile Middle East. Jeffrey Wright is a lawyer doing due diligence on the merger for rainmaker Christopher Plummer. The fictional Gulf emirate is represented by the dynastic struggle at the top and the unfortunate fate of immigrant oil workers at the bottom. You definitely have to pay attention to pick up the interweaving of plot strands, but huge amounts of information are delivered in passing, along with a “you are there” feel for some of the world’s trouble spots. When it comes to the role of oil in the world’s woe, this film is preaching to the converted in my case; I already believe the bastards of big oil (along with big pharma, as revealed in the vaguely similar Constant Gardener) are behind most of it. And this film strains my credulity less than Michael Moore. To get it, you need to work at it, and I like that in a movie. (2005, AMC in PA, n.) *8* (MC-76, RT-74.)

This is a busy season, of course, and my film viewing lately has been catch as catch can. I watched a couple of documentaries on the building of the Guggenheim in NYC, for a piece I was writing on Frank Lloyd Wright. The 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder brought a re-broadcast of Imagine, and since I’ve been revisiting Sixties musical icons lately, I was quite interested in this rather hagiographic documentary. Another blast from the past was Three Days of the Condor: Sydney Pollack’s 30-year old thriller about the CIA and oil holds up very well, better than most from the so-called golden age of Hollywood independents; the only real problem is that Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway are way too glamorous for their roles -- so much for gritty realism. Realism was the crux of 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom’s recent leap over the barrier between feature films and pornography -- he makes explicit sex engaging and psychologically revealing, but just alternates bedroom with concert scenes, and leaves out the narrative structure that would make it compelling.