A Flawed Movie

[tabuno]

I agree that this movie is an important movie dealing with one of the most explosive and serious topics today. However, the movie itself failed to rise to the quality that Soderbergh obtained in his movie Traffic (2000). The pacing was slow, the links almost mystifyingly and painfully loose. I felt the movie was manipulative in places. Unlike Spy Game (2001), there was none of the tight tension intelligent thrills as if George Clooney's years of intelligence experience (in the script, not performance) had evaporated even before the movie began. Unlike Traffic or The Ipcress File (1965), the harsh, gritty element was missing making the movie disjointed between mainstream moviemaking and independent starkness. The set up was disjointed, cluttered unlike the slow but smooth, indirect approached taken in the underappreciated The Tailor of Panama (2000).

The Amir's oldest son's security was unreasonably flimsy in places reducing the integrity of the movie. The separation between husband and wife didn't seem real either. Somehow even the terrorist development angle didn't seem to contain the rugged, stark foreign atmospherics that Jarhead (2005) enveloped its audience with the cinematic brilliance of its photography and dirty quality.

The movie was a big disappointment for me considering the importance of the message, it almost seemed to be an act of sabotage. Even George Clooney's The Peacemaker (1997) seemed more credible and compelling than Syriana in its script pacing, development, and execution.

[Chris Knipp]

STEPHEN GAGHAN: SYRIANA

The same dish with more ingredients

Review by Chris Knipp

Syriana is a stew. Stephen Gaghan, who wrote and directed it, is the cook. He has gone back to an excellent recipe that worked well for him five years ago, which came directly from the superb 1989 British TV miniseries, Traffik, written by Simon Moore and directed by Alistair Reed. That series was a goldmine for him -- and not surprisingly: it was profound stuff, and compulsive watching.

Gaghan followed this recipe for the first time writing a direct adaptation of the UK miniseries for the Hollywood screen. The result, Traffic (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh, moved back and forth between Mexico and the United States, rather than Europe and Asia as in the original. The drug became cocaine instead of heroin. And the number of main languages was reduced from three to two. To further simplify, Gaghan took out a major Traffik subplot about the plight of a poor poppy grower who can't support his family growing other crops. There aren't any poor drug producers at the bottom of Soderbergh's Traffic, only warring drug lords and corrupt officials and corruptible cops. Soderbergh also added a batch of well-known actors, including Michael Douglas and his new wife Catherine Zeta-Jones. The result could hardly compete with Moore's Traffik for richness and momentum and verisimilitude, but the Traffik recipe was well condensed, a good movie resulted, and Oscars were awarded, including Best Screenplay to Gaghan.

A year later Gaghan tried to direct his own film (with his screenplay), Abandon, with Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, and Charlie Hunnam, about a college senior whose life gets too complicated when her old boyfriend reappears. The movie disappeared without a sound.


This time, five years since Traffic, Gaghan has gone back and drawn on the formula that got him an Oscar. Both writing and directing again, he has recast Robert Baer's memoir of life as a CIA foot soldier, See No Evil, applying the Traffik formula to make another screenplay with a multi-layered plot out of it. The focus has changed to US control of oil and the Mideast and world power struggles, instead of the global drug nexus.

To work on this ambitious level Gaghan got lots of help from the Soderbergh-Clooney brat pack. Their production company Section Eight is involved, and Ocean's pal Matt Damon has a central role with his new wife Amanda Peet. American characters include stars like William Hurt, barely visible; Chris Cooper, in another of his increasingly familiar organization bad guy roles; Christopher Plummer as a haughty CEO, and Jeffrey Wright as a very buttoned down corporate lawyer with a failed papa. Above all there's Clooney himself as the central figure, a beleaguered CIA operative who tries to act on his own for once, but fails. Clooney's commitment to the role included 30 extra pounds and a beard; this time he is neither debonair nor handsome. No place was found for Brad Pitt or Don Cheadle in this story. Instead there is excellent casting for the Arab and Pakistani roles, though the only one likely to be recognized is Alexander Siddig of Kingdom of Heaven as the ambitious Gulf prince, Nasir Al-Subaai. Inspired by the authenticity of Moore's Traffik, which he recreated for Soderbergh's film, Gaghan has produced a whole panoply of real-seeming settings and sets of people.

But most scenes go by too fast or appear too briefly to be fully appreciated. Syriana is not only an old recipe with new ingredients added, like a pot-au-feu, but has a chaotic feel; it's rich and tasty but indigestible.That the multilayered approach doesn't work as well for the audience in Syriana as it did in Traffik or Traffic is indicated by the fact that almost everybody throws up their hands at following the plot, at some point admitting they've forgotten what language was being spoken, who a character was, or exactly what he had to do with the main sequence of which he presumably was a part. It's not clear Gaghan can edit or direct as well as Soderbergh did with his Traffic screenplay. Gaghan switches back and forth between subplots faster than he (or Soderbergh's editor) did in Traffic, sometimes giving us only a few seconds to see something starting to happen. He tries too hard to say too much in too little time. The ladle stirs the pot so fast the stew's splashing out.

This is not to say the movie has no rewards. It is to be commended for its high seriousness, even though like Clooney's very fine Good Night, and Good Luck it's a little self-important (Traffik avoided that). What it has to say is complex and sophisticated. The topics raised are more numerous than those mentionied here but include the skimming off the top by oil monarchs, the role of China as the emerging major economy, the US administration's blocking of intelligence that undercuts its right wing agendas, long distance push-button assassinations, bribery and corruption as major features of world business, American style; and the recruitment and training of a jihadist -- which this time provides an underdog equivalent to the poor poppy grower type Gaghan left out of Traffic. The kinds of Arabic used may or may not be authentic for the situations -- despite much study of the language, I can't really say -- but at least it's present wherever it should be, as is the language of the future terrorists in the madrasa. It's made clear that oil company CEO's are cynical but don't know very well what they're doing. Hardly anybody does, in this picture, and that's the way things probably are in the world according to Robert Baer. Whether that makes a really good movie is another question. I was amused by the New Yorker critic who wrote Syriana was "a major film without being a great film." Yeah. And it's going to make some people really mad, if they bother to go see it. I can't wait for the CIA, the oil experts, and the Arabists to have a go at it.

Comparison of Traffik and Traffic by James Berardinelli.

New Yorker review of Syriana.

Interviews with Baer by
Buzzflash and the Foreign Policy Association .

[Chris Knipp]

I don't have tabuno's problems with Syriana about pacing, atmosphere, and verisimilitude. I think the technical part that bothered me is the photography, at moments anyway. Otherwise its more the overambitiusness of the screenplay and the confusing editing that bother me and we agree the material is explosive and the movie is important.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp: "I don't have tabuno's problems with Syriana about pacing, atmosphere, and verisimilitude. I think the technical part that bothered me is the photography, at moments anyway. Otherwise its more the overambitiusness of the screenplay and the confusing editing that bother me and we agree the material is explosive and the movie is important."

Tab Uno:

Pacing. I would think that editing has a lot do to with pacing, by cutting and putting too much into a movie makes for a inconsistent pace, tempo for the movie, stop, start, cut away, jerky timing to the movie that makes for a bumpy temporal experience.

Atmosphere. The American Film Institute defines atmosphere as, "The overall mood of a film evoked by such elements as lighting, sets, costumes, music, and camera work. When I watched both "Traffic" and "Jarhead" there were powerful images of raw, gritty, harsh, dirty realism in the foreign countries whereas in "Syriana" this major component seemed more often than not sanitized - polished. Even the poor workers' quarters didn't have the same texture as Jarhead's dirty look of the Marine base in the desert or Traffic's Mexican detention quarters even though the design elements were vividly crowded. The eerie lighting in both "Traffic" and "Jarhead" were haunting and added immensely to the mood, while "Syriana" failed to raise the emotional undertone in the same way.

Verisimilitude. Because of the compressed nature of compacting so much into this movie, the realism of the characters became reduced to almost two-dimensional characters as the depth of their experiences were not fleshed out. George Clooney's character seemed to be bereft of his intelligence experience having to make extraordinary efforts it seemed for a veteran CIA operative, well respected, to figure out what was going on and in fact not having in the movie to back up his threat later in the movie (call my bluff). Clooney's old style intuitive, feel, humanistic approach to intelligence seemed to never even existed based on what Clooney presented on the screen, he had to look up to see his colleagues with these shocked faces? For somebody who's supposed to be able to look out for himself, he really was caught flat-footed, and, even if so, just the image of incredulity and disbelief would have been appreciated. Even the terrorist, didn't seem to be given sufficient screen time, even though I intellectually knew what he was supposed to be going through, his conversion didn't seem to progress in a way that I could see any transformation, conflict. To tell the truth I saw more verisimilitude in brother to brother relationships in the first five minutes of "Chronicles of Naria" than I saw in terms of relationships in this movie.

[Chris Knipp]

I definitely see what you mean about the lack of grittiness in the poor workers' quarters. About Bob, the Clooney character, I think the idea was that he was rather burnt out at that stage, but also, he just made a wrong call, or of course he wouldn't have played into the hends of the kidnapper/torturer as he did. For the rest, I continue to feel it doesn't bother me as much, though some of the scenes are too short and the screeplay tries to include too much and it becomes incoherent at times, for most viewers.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp posted:

About Bob, the Clooney character, I think the idea was that he was rather burnt out at that stage, but also, he just made a wrong call, or of course he wouldn't have played into the hends of the kidnapper/torturer as he did.

I can't believe that George Clooney would have had his character come across with as much disbelievability if it hadn't been for the overloaded script and the underdevelopment of the characters. I'm going to assume that George did as well as he could with the material he was given. It would have been great if a bit more work had gone into providing scenes for Clooney's character that suggested his state of mind and his ability as a CIA agent better.

What I expected was someone like Robert Redford in Spy Game (2001). Instead what would have been a better character are those played by Kevin Costner in such movies as the The Bodyguard (1992) or even his role in No Way Out (1987). I think that Kevin Costner is one of the best male actors who can and almost always portrays imperfect male characters in movies, a role that would have suited Syriana well.

[Chris Knipp]

I see. Well, Clooney does do his best. Why mention Redford and Costner? Their presence would be even more distracting, and switching actors wouldn't right the problems you find in the script.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp posted:

I see. Well, Clooney does do his best. Why mention Redford and Costner? Their presence would be even more distracting, and switching actors wouldn't right the problems you find in the script.

How Redford and Costner portrayed their characters in their respective movies was how I could have seen Clooney's performance being more powerful or believable in Syriana. Redford came across in his movie as a master tactician who have a great grasp of intelligence operations and demonstrating in the movie his skill as a operative out in the field, unlike Clooney's character who came across almost feeble and weak, clumsy and uninspiring. Costner comes across in his movie as a conflicted man with doubts and reservations, a person who has made mistakes, a believable human being, unlike Clooney who we don't get to see enough of his inner turmoil or doubts, it just seems like confusion, but never any glimmer of who he had been or why he's really so malleable and open for being fooled the way he does or why it takes him so long to figure something out. Either or these other portrayals, I believe would have made Syriana a significantly more enjoyable and qualitative better film.

[Chris Knipp]

You begin to convince me. I completely see what you're saying and I think I agree with it. But it's got to be there in the writing also, I think, to have the character as yoiu describe him. And that's where Gaghan comes in. I still think his problem was overambition. And those Brits who make Traffik had a light touch we rarely achieve.

[wpqx]

Well I saw the film and I too found it flawed. It seemed like either an overly crowded two hour film, or a three hour film severely cut. There were too many characters, and I think a film could have been made of just Bob that would have been damn good. Gaghan seems to think that bigger is better, and therefore he throws too much in here. The film also takes an extremely pessemistic tone and that as usual is disguised as art. There was no saving grace or redeeming message. Instead we were left with a great bunch of misery and corruption. Perhaps that's "reality" but the film robs us of any hope, and therefore its hard to walk away feeling anything but disappointment.

[Chris Knipp]

Definitely flawed. But I felt feelings more positive than disappointment, in fact I wasn't disappoointed at all, because the exact weaknesses of the film were those that everybody who'd seen it had already mentioned, including what reviews I'd gotten wind of, so I didn't go in to watch it with overly high hopes about clarity of presentation and sharpness of editing. It is good for being complex, ambitious, and serious. Both its weaknesses and its strengths can be traced back to its origins, primarily to Traffik/Traffic and the method used there, which Gaghan follows imperfectly here, and to the two Baer books, and other information Gaghan in person, collected following in Baer's footsteps and incorporated in the film, incuding the time he was 'kidnapped' by Hezbullah. He had too much to deal with, but one can feel his excitement about the material and his eagerness to communicate what he has learned, and thre's much to admire in the quality of the cast and the authetnticity of the settings and languages. I can't call all that a disapointment, but the result is definitely imperfect as a movie, this is what Denby meant by saying it's "major movie but not a great one", i think, and your opening remark that it's "either an overly crowded two hour film, or a three hour film severely cut." is quite justified. People said of Soderbergh's Traffic that it needed to be longer, and this is why the 5 1/2-hour 1989 miniseries remains structurally the most successful. Even it is highly edited and schematic, but it is long enough to present all the material. Traffic and Syriana aren't. I still think Syriana is one of the absolute not-to-be-missed American movies of the year, but not artistically the best--Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck is artistically much more successful.

[oscar jubis]

I was deeply engaged and fascinated by Syriana from beginning to end. My admiration is extended primarily to the film's producers, for green-lighting such a serious-minded, compelling film about the oil business. I am assuming, until I hear otherwise, that they exerted no pressure on writer/director Stephen Gaghan to make a 2-hour film. I would agree with many who believe Syriana is too short in relation to its material. Certainly there isn't any less of it in Syriana than in the 147 min. Traffic, which Mr. Gaghan wrote. Syriana feels like the abridged version of a (near) masterpiece_I am very curious about the film's pre-production history. It appears to me that a longer running time would be required to further develop a few principal characters. (Also, given the lack of a track record, Mr. Gaghan's skill as a director of actors is to be questioned). But the connecting tissue missing from the narrative body conveys what I believe to be a basic fact: the whole dirty system of relationships behind getting oil here from there is so complex and tangled that no single person or entity fully understands it. Syriana's tagline, "everything is connected" should be followed by "and no one knows exactly how". This is bound to make some viewers uncomfortable. At least I hope it does because it's a normal response when one is confronted with certain unpleasant realities about the world we have created.

[cinemabon]

I came across this thread quite by accident... I urge every participant in this forum to check it out.

Please link to the following:

http://question911.com/links.php

I believe that after you watch for only a few minutes, you find the relevence to this film. I discovered this link on IMDB when researching this film. Please let me know what you think. This was an eye opener! Or, maybe I'm just naive.

[Chris Knipp]

That's a big download. What is it?

There is a lot of material that you could relate to Syriana....a good place to start would be with Baer's two books, as in fact Stephen Gaghan did himself, or other books about Bush, oil, and the CIA.

[Chris Knipp]

In reply to Oscar's post on Syriana: I agree with a lot of what you say. I think it is an important movie, even though it doesn't entirely work. It's sophistication and complexity are to be admired and are being rewarded in people's Best Lists (indlucing mine, I'm almost sure). However while you can say that the relationships are very complicated, that doesn't mean that the motivations and the underlying power structure aren't rather simple and clear. Using Traffik/Traffic as the obvious analogy.... very, very complicated system, but with big clear forces like poverty, greed, and addiction governing them in unmistakable ways.