In his first turn in the director’s chair since the political
minefield of The Legend of Bagger Vance(?!?!), Robert Redford
joins the well-intentioned, liberal baby-boomer chorus with his uniquely astute reaction to the War on Terror, Lions for
Lambs.
Along with screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, Redford leads his
all-star cast through what basically amounts to a diluted
Syriana: a Stephen Gaghan-styled “issues” movie complete with
multiple, simultaneous, interlocked, and globe-trotting storylines. In
this case we find a disaffected TV news reporter (Meryl Streep) facing
an ambitious Republican senator (played by a believably smarmy Tom
Cruise, shining once again in another stretch-less asshole role) with
yet another short-sighted military strategy; a college professor
(Redford) trying to inspire a lazy, privileged student; and two
martyred minorities (Michael Peña and Derek Luke) fighting in
the mountains of Afghanistan—and all, of course, are loosely
married to one another by decision or circumstance.
Where Redford’s more populist approach strays most from the Gaghan
school is in his choice to lean more heavily on sentiment than
statistics to drive his point home—with predictably mixed
results. Lions for Lambs rings with considerably more humanity
than Gaghan’s somewhat academic exercises, but its moralist
simplicities also threaten to derail the whole
enterprise—propping in one-dimensional characters in place of
vast swatches of the American population (the disaffected college
student, the noble poor, the self-interested media, etc.), and then
selling them to us with “heart.” What’s perhaps most paradoxical is
that—in spite of the fact that there are roughly a half-dozen
less storylines to follow—Redford manages scarcely more character
development than Syriana, save perhaps for the questionable
caricatures of the two saintly servicemen—a move that does more
than any other to trip up his vision.
At the very least, Redford one-ups the typical “we are irredeemably
fucked” sentiment of similar political exercises by attempting to
provide a few solutions—though I’m not entirely convinced that
his seemingly pro-draft rhetoric is any better an answer. Still, if you
simply can’t get enough of Hollywood’s cramped meditations on the
current conflict, you could do a hell of a lot worse.