LIONS FOR LAMBS
Reviewed by Sam Hatch
Lions for Lambs is one of those hot-button films that straddles the line between being an important film and a self-important film. In the long run, I find it falls squarely in the latter category, but it at least makes a stab at creating a dialogue amongst audience members even if it offers no concrete answers of its own.
The title references the respect German soldiers had for their British opponents in World War I. The lions being the hellfire-breathing grunts on the muddy battlefields and the lambs being their commanding superiors safe behind comfortable desks back home. The script (by middle-east aficionado Matthew Michael Carnahan, who also wrote the equally uneven The Kingdom) applies this description to our current crop of soldiers and leaders slogging through the war in Iraq.
The film is a talky triptych that jumps back and forth between three stories all occupying the same hour of time. The first is a meeting between Tom Cruise's permagrin wearing Republican Senator Jasper Irving and Meryl Streep's aging media hound Janine Roth, who once was an ardent supporter of the man in his early career. Senator Irving is now knee deep in President Bush's quagmire of a war and wishes to give Roth the scoop on a super-secret strategy involving Afghanistan. A strategy that he swears will officially win the war on terror. Janine however has the sneaking suspicion that he's looking to sell her and the public a bill of goods that will ultimately lead to his own shot at the Presidency.
Cruise sports a realistic Senatorial helmet of perfect hair, and is great at lying through his teeth with a Tony Robbins-esque hypnotic glare. On the flipside, it's hard to initially believe in Cruise as anything other than a movie star, and when Janine scans the Senator's walls decked with myriad photographs of himself beside real administration members, it looks fake. Your first thought is – hey, it's Tom Cruise photoshopped next to Condi Rice!
While the back and forth between Cruise and Streep is a showcase of accomplished actors strutting their respective stuff, it also struck me that this is essentially a replay of a similarly structured scene in the film Magnolia. Of course here he's talking politics instead of bogus male empowerment rhetoric, but it's still the same case of Cruise and the adversarial journalist lobbing volleys back and forth.
The more action packed segment of the film takes place in Afghanistan, as Senator Irving's new plan takes effect. Peter Berg (director of The Kingdom – what's going on here?) is the commander in charge of sending out a small platoon of troops in the hopes of securing a strategic defensive position crucial to neutralizing forthcoming adversaries. When the 'clear' mountains turn out to be hot with anti-aircraft fire, we're left with two survivors of the attack (Derek Luke's Arian and Michael Pena's Ernest) trapped in a hostile environment with hostile soldiers closing in on their position.
For all of the initial action inherent in this scenario, make no mistake that this film is essentially a stage play masquerading as a motion picture. What follows is largely character driven (and very similar to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, in which Pena also costars), and what little we see of the Afghani mountainside could easily be recreated with spray paint and foam on any given college theater stage.
And speaking of college, that's where the final story occurs – in the office of Poli-Sci Professor Stephen Malley (Robert Redford) as he takes an hour out of his busy morning to try convincing his promising student Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield) to stop skipping class and start buckling down. Once again, there's a large amount of back-and-forth at play, as we learn that Todd has become a disaffected youth who wonders aloud why he should bother trying to make a difference when his actions essentially don't matter in the long run.
This story limb seems the least connected at first, until we learn that the characters from the second thread are also entwined in Malley's tale. Redford can do this type of work in his sleep, but even so I found myself hanging on his every word. It's also refreshing to find that he cedes numerous points to this privileged punk of a kid, so it's not just a case of the sage professor handing down knowledge from upon his crusty summit. Though he does have his moments, such as when he points out that one never knows exactly when adulthood hits, and that by the time you realize it you've invariably already made ten or twelve life-changing decisions.
Thankfully, there are moments when this story moves out of the confined location of his office to show a series of flashbacks involving previous students in the heat of debate. Visually, the film is solid enough even though that's not where its bread and butter resides. I don't know if it was the print I was watching, but there were no deep blacks (everything turns into a shade of dark blue) despite the high level of detail in the nighttime segments in the snow swept Afghanistan mountain ranges. There are a few splashy scenes involving transport helicopters suffering enemy fire, but the rest of the film is about people talking and talking. And talking.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing – the film very smartly keeps each segment as short as possible, and with each piece spanning the same hour it could have been easy to make a sprawling three hour epic with everything unfolding in real time. It also has a quiver full of questions that it fires at you. Has the media become irreparably tamed? Can a real story actually be aired anymore if it doesn't involve a celebrity? Can any politician be trusted when the promise of the White House looms in their future? Is it a noble thing to fight in a war you don't believe in? Is a lack of action ever justifiable?
There's also the question of whether or not our youth are a bunch of pussies, and it explores the Catch 22 of them catching blame for enjoying the life that their ancestors fought to give them. It's that eternal dichotomy of the father toiling to make a good life for his child, but then resenting the fact that his child doesn't have to struggle for it. I know I'm a pussy, but at times I like to think that I could make a real sacrifice if push came to shove. Lions for Lambs celebrates everyone who makes such a sacrifice.
It also doesn't offer any solid answers, but at least it asks some of the right questions. Yet for those hungering for either a pro-war or anti-war film, you're not going to get any such satisfaction. It plays its cards on both sides of the table, and throws a counterpoint at any given point one way or the other. Its best advice is to at least do something with your life, even if the benefit from such an act eludes you at the time.
Unfortunately, it suffers from a case of trying way too hard, and never feels as important as it thinks it is. Some fellow viewers were speaking about how the tension was almost unbearable at points, but I found it to be a rather casual viewing experience that never forced its way beyond arm's length. It's designed to make each viewer assess their own judgments and choices (and to beg for Oscar gold), but the ultimate question you may find yourself asking is “Did I really need to spend ten dollars to see this in the theater?”