Oil's well that ends well

Noel Vera

Steve Gaghan's "Syriana," based on the memoirs of Robert Baer (a
former CIA case officer who worked in the Middle East), is one of a
series of serious political thrillers to have come out of Hollywood
recently--a response, I believe, to 9/11 and the United States'
swing into Republican conservatism (Just think, only a few years
back they were giving the Best Picture Oscar to three-hour hobbit
movies). More complex than George Clooney's straightforward "Good
Night, and Good Luck," more hardhearted than Steven Spielberg's
anguished "Munich," more panoramic in scope than Fernando Meirelles'
microscopically focused "The Constant Gardener," "Syriana's" most
notable effect is the way it immerses you in a little over two
hours' worth of Middle Eastern economics, espionage and politics,
making you feel like a colony of ants crawling over a vast
landscape.

The action ranges from the Washington Beltway to Geneva to Marbella,
Spain to an unspecified Arabic country (actually a mix of UAE,
Morocco, and Egypt); from conferences between oil companies and Arab
princes consulting their American financial advisors to a terrorist
recruiter speaking before jobless workers; from a luxurious pool
party on a huge estate to a room with white tiles stained with
blood. The film hits the ground running and explains very little
along the way: all at once you're dealing with four different
storylines and about a dozen characters, and the effect is not a
little confusing, not a little frightening--which, when you come to
think of it, is pretty much the way things are at the moment.

That difficulty may be the film's defining virtue and inescapable
weakness. Some critics compare it to '70s thrillers like "The
Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," noting that while
those films celebrated maverick heroism, this one gives us no heroes
to identify with; others cite filmmakers like Costa-Gavras, whose
works ("State of Siege," "Z") were passionately clear on what was
right and what was wrong, and complain that "Syriana's" muddy issues
are its way of assuming a profundity it doesn't earn.

Perhaps so; but then again, perhaps Costa-Gavras' style of
filmmaking was more appropriate for the material he dealt with in
the '70s (even then people questioned his approach, claimed it more
simplistic than simple), and that with changing times you need a
changing approach (Costa-Gavras would eventually develop a slower,
more nuanced but less vivid storytelling style himself).
Perhaps "Syriana" is more a product of the new millennium, where
issues are confused and heroism subdued. I don't know if a good film
can be made nowadays with both passionate clarity and a good grasp
of the situation--Spielberg's "Munich" was a brave but flawed
attempt. I do think Gaghan's is a more persuasive if not actually
useful attack: do away with coherence, cram as much detail as you
can in two hours plus, and hope for the best (Gaghan is best known
for writing Steven Soderbergh's drug epic "Traffic," and seems to
have used a similar "everything but the kitchen sink and instruction
manual" approach). Information overload isn't the wave of the
future, it's the curse of the present, and the film I think
acknowledges this with its style.

If anything at all clarifies the film for us, it's the eyes--all
kinds of eyes, looking in all directions. One of the most haunting
might be Bob Barnes (George Clooney), the Robert Baer character;
he's deep into the CIA's operations, having staged many of them
himself, so deep inside that talking to his college-age son--who
knows nothing, except that his parents are a couple of spooks--is
like shouting down from a mountaintop. Barnes is something of a dead
albatross to the CIA--too dangerous to retire behind a desk, too
burned-out to be of much more use at the field; more interesting is
that Barnes himself grows less and less sure as to what his
allegiances are, and why. Clooney plays the deeply troubled man as
if he's several months behind on sleep, insomniac from all the
nightmare memories of what he's seen or done (if those eyes look
familiar to some viewers, strangely enough they are: Joel Torre wore
a similar pair of eyes, as the police officer haunted by unspeakable
memories in Lav Diaz's "Batang West Side" (West Side Avenue)).

Bryan Woodman's eyes (Matt Damon) show hunger; as an up-and-coming
energy analyst, he's got the swivel stare of someone seeking out
advantage, however, wherever he can find it. A grotesque tragedy
humanizes him for a moment, but only a moment; just as our response
to any accident is dictated by our nature as human beings, Woodman's
response to the tragedy is to turn his eyes away from his pain and
his grieving wife (the lovely Amanda Peet) to look at the
opportunity that falls into his grasp. Jeffrey Wright's eyes, in
turn, are remarkable for how little they give away; as Bennett
Holiday, a lawyer assigned to do a due diligence review on two oil
companies' merger (with the understanding that he get it approved
without asking too many questions), he makes you ask: just how far
will he go along?

Mazhar Munir's eyes as Wasim, a laid-off Pakistani laborer, are
appealingly lackadaisical--of all the characters in the film, his
are the only ones that don't seem driven, don't seem to feel the
need to accomplish great things; all he wants is a job. He's a
directionless pawn caught in the crosscurrents all the other
characters are making, and he finds himself drifting along
helplessly, until the first man to take interest reels him in. It's
the thinnest of the storylines Gaghan spins out, but Munir's eyes
are memorable for what they have and lose--a benign innocence, not
quite crushed by suffering, gradually replaced by innocence of an
altogether more malevolent sort.

The title "Syriana," never explained in the film, is a think-tank
term for a reshaped Middle East, one that, it's implied, will
guarantee a continuous flow of oil to the Western countries--an
ironic term, if ever there was one; looking at the morass that this
picture sketches for us (and I doubt if any film can be anything
more than just a sketch), it seems that if anything, it's the
Western countries, their people, and their peoples' souls that have
been reshaped in all kinds of ways, by a limitless appetite for oil.
One of the best films to come out of Hollywood in 2005.

(First published in Businessworld, 2/24/06)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)