Like the son I never really had an opinion one way or the other about: the script by William Monahan for Body of Lies depicts yet another post-Oedipal, woman-free zone of masculine friendships and apathy.
Shortly before departing the house for what turned out to be a private viewing of Body of Lies (evidently even Peckhamplex’s “bargain Tuesdays” have failed to beat the credit crunch, or indeed the lacklustre reviews), I saw the opening segment of the December 1st Daily Show: in it, Jon Stewart and John Oliver discussed the recent terrorist attacks in India, and concluded that the perpetrators were “motherfucking motherfuckers”. This alternative news show, normally quite willing to dig deeper and more acutely than major US news networks, responded emotionally and crudely to the tragedy. Ridley Scott, director of this new but by no means fresh geopolitical thriller, fails to engage either emotionally or intellectually with the subject, and concludes much the same as these pseudo-journalists, only without the slight hint of grace required to illicit laughs in light of a massacre.
It is difficult to in the film down, it spins away in so many lacklustre directions. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA operative in Iraq who is frequently mis-handled by Russell Crowe’s overweight strategist back in Langley. Between them they manage to balls up seemingly every operation they come into contact with, preferably utilising missile-laden helicopters. It turns out that, while this sort of thing is permissible in the war zone around Baghdad, it doesn’t fly so well in Amman, where DiCaprio’s Ferris initiates a hesitant yet doomed friendship with the self styled king of Jordanian intel. As the script later spells out, trust is the overriding factor in cross-cultural co-operation involving Arab nations and organisations, and Uncle Sam seems inherently unable to show all his cards.
With the casual detail and atmospherics that come as standard with a Scott production (from either brother, for that matter), it is at first a pleasure to watch an Iraq depicted as a real place, rather than the dramatic borderland of DePalma’s Redacted, or the bomb-stricken dysfunctional state viewed nightly on BBC news. However, the more destinations the film visits, the more they each feel the same, as though every Middle Eastern country had the same roads, architecture, bakeries, and slums. For all the absurdity of James Bond’s latest sojourn around the globe, at least every place he visited felt alive with its own customs, weather, people, and even introductory font. The people moving in front of this background don’t liven it up much either: protagonist Ferris orchestrates his existence as if he is writing the screenplay of the film himself, while Crowe’s Analyst Ed Hoffman serves little purpose than to provide a counter-image of America: the packaged sushi-eating bad father to DiCaprio’s do-gooding cultural nomad (although, if he loves the Middle East so much and has worked there so long, why does he make such rookie mistakes as offering a new inamoratas his hand to shake while being watched by so many purist locals?).
Amongst the anonymous score by Marc Streitenfeld and unremarkable Pietro Scalia editing, one of the few pleasures to be had is Mark Strong’s performance as Jordanian intelligence chief Hani. Walking a fine line between several cliché characterisations, all of them a million miles away from each other, he lends dramatic weight and intellectual curiosity (if not believability) to all scenes in which the character features. William Monahan’s script fails to provide the same taste and refinement for the other characters, while the narrative he crafts follows a similar sons-impressing-their-father’s trajectory as his work on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed, but is tellingly free from the bracingly unique statements of personality and individual identity that made those so sly and rewarding.
The film is watchable enough, and were it a movie of the week imported to this country from HBO, it would be little more than an uninteresting diversion. However, with the calibre of much of the talent, and the indication from many of those involved from previous projects that they have an interest and sensitivity towards a more compelling and progressive depiction of geopolitics than one finds in the latest Bruckheimer production, Body of Lies is a sore and unwarranted disappointment.
No comments:
Post a Comment