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For the first time in his career, leading man George Clooney has no need for his good looks. A scraggly beard covers his chiseled chin as CIA Agent Robert Barnes, one of many crisscrossing characters in filmmaker Stephen Gaghan's engrossing political drama, Syriana. Clooney's face is sun-burnt and bloated. His body is soft and sags in the middle as if beaten down by the dangerous tasks he's assigned by his government. He acts as the social conscience of the sweeping Syriana without the safety net of his sex appeal or wiseacre sense of humor — and it's fine. If he cut off his right ear midway into the movie, your eyes would still be peeled on him. He replaces his handsome looks with emotional substance and a sense of self-defeat. It's the best thing he has to offer as an actor who's finally discovered his extraordinary capabilities.
Boy wizard Harry Potter might be the hero of Hollywood box office, but Clooney is responsible for bringing seriousness back to mainstream American film. He was recently seen as Fred Friendly, TV producer and friend to newsman Edward R. Murrow, in the McCarthy-era drama Good Night, and Good Luck, a film he also directed.
It's absorbing drama and excellent filmmaking, but Syriana shows Clooney's growth as an actor. More importantly, with his last two films he's become noble.
He remains a Hollywood hunk, much like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Steve McQueen, but those guys never starred in or helped make a movie like Syriana. His presence turns the film's ethical dilemmas into high drama and makes it the rare socially conscious film that's also a thriller.
Clooney is the soul of Syriana, but his performance is boosted by the best ensemble cast of the year — something that speaks to Gaghan's writing, taste for political stories and confidence in his filmmaking. Yet calling Syriana a Middle Eastern political drama only scrapes the surface of everything Gaghan wants to say in the film.
Barnes finds himself discarded by the organization he's served loyally for years. Energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) partners with Gulf Prince Nasir Al-Subaai (Alexander Siddig) and finds himself caught between family and corporate intrigue. Washington, D.C. attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) struggles to protect the shady merger between two large U.S. oil companies. Meanwhile, Pakistani teen Wasim Ahmed Khan (Mazhar Munir) loses his oil company job and joins up with a radical cleric.
The film's title comes from the phrase "Pax Syriana," referring to peace in Lebanon enforced by the Syrian Army. Headline news for 2005 includes Syria withdrawing the last of its 14,000-troop military garrison in Lebanon and ending its 29-year military domination of that country. This means that the complexity of religion, business, politics and history make piecing together the key stories in Syriana more difficult, but also more satisfying.
Damon's all-American looks and believable greed find a perfect home in the enterprising Woodman. Wright simmers as Holiday, an attorney who puts his client above ethics. Sudanese actor Siddig, last seen in the rousing Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven, is the true hero of the movie, a man dedicated to aiding the people of his country. Tim Blake Nelson and Christopher Plummer appear briefly as men who work behind the scenes for oil companies, but they enjoy some of the film's best lines.
All of these individual stories connect via Gaghan's point of view, one that's persuasively critical of U.S. oil companies and the U.S. governmental policies that support them. His best scripts are those that tackle timely, political issues versus his stumbles — the young adult thrillers Havoc and Abandon and the period western The Alamo.
Gaghan's screenplay for Rules of Engagement was about a Marine rescue mission at a Yemen embassy that goes badly. (It was considered a right-wing action movie when it was released.) His best-known work, Traffic, a sprawling ensemble drama about the costly war on drugs and how America is losing the battle, won him an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Syriana is in the mold of Traffic and the TV miniseries The Prize in scope but contains a bitter cynicism all its own. (Robert Baer's book See No Evil is the source of the script.)
Director of photography Robert Elswit (Good Night, and Good Luck) captures the hazy beauty of Middle Eastern heat, and editor Tim Squyres keeps the stories moving and coherent — but it's Gaghan's script that holds Syriana's compelling story together. It helps that he confronts the film's timely issues head on without holding back criticism of U.S. government actions.
Syriana preaches, and that's a danger for any serious filmmaker. But Gaghan comes out of the film with his integrity intact. Grade: B+
