Unstinting in its condemnation of apathy, expedience, and the people in power who take advantage of those traits in the population at large, LIONS FOR LAMBS nonetheless is a flat work that feels more like a series of actors’ exercises than the incisive movie it wants to be. Like the college professor trying to shock a promising student out of his complacency, it has its heart in the right place. Unlike that professor, it’s not telling the audience anything new, nor is it telling it in a particularly compelling fashion.
The professor is played by Robert Redford, who also directed and is one of the executive producers. He gets fine performances from all his actors. He does not, however, get them a dynamic script. He does give them a highly structured one, though, with three different stories all interacting with one another more or less tangentially. There is the professor’s, which takes place, according to the caption, at an unnamed California university. Said professor teaches political science and he spends the film trying to engage the enthusiasm of a bright but cynical student by telling him the story of two other students who were less bright, less affluent, but more committed to changing the world. That plot is intercut with those two students (Derek Luke and Michael Pena) on a mission in Afghanistan that is not going well. That mission is the brainchild of an ambitious senator (Tom Cruise) who is giving an exclusive on this latest strategy to win the war on terror to a seasoned political reporter (Meryl Streep) from a cable news network. During the 88 minute running time, those three stories should but fail to reflect each other, nor do they build any sort of resonance, even when Luke and Pena find themselves under fire and behind enemy lines. The reason for that last is because putting the idealistic innocents in harm’s way is the cheapest, most obvious, dare I say most cynical, device possible to provoke an audience reaction.
Luke and Pena, are charming. Redford is properly charismatic in his trademark laid-back fashion. Cruise is wonderful as the neo-con who doesn’t let facts, or the lives that a blunder costs, get in the way of his dandy new plan, even when the journalist in front of him explains that this was the same tactic used in Vietnam 40 years before with disastrous results. He’s a cross between a used-car salesmen and a wayward televangelist, making the sale and preaching the virtue of it with a firm jaw, a calculated smile, and eyes that have the same gleam as those a top predator contemplating the lower end of the food chain. It’s Streep’s film, though, as her character jars herself with coming to terms with a news division that has become a cog in a corporation geared to ratings and profits rather than serving the public with real information. The story arc of every other character in the film is as predictable as yesterday’s weather. Streep infuses her character, a real journalist, albeit an aging one, in a world of big hair, pop culture, and the bottom line, with a palpable inner conflict that comes as close as is humanly possible to rising above such hack trappings as the montage of government buildings her character passes after the disillusionment of her interview with the senator.
LIONS FOR LAMBS is politics in theory and practice, a fine conceit, but it fails to use that conceit to illuminate the subject matter. Instead, this is a checklist of political ills to be slogged through with a perfunctory nod to each of the points as they are made, all leading up to an ending that is as trite as it is anti-climactic.
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