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Poster (c) Warner Bros.
George Clooney (who should become the best director for Good Night, and Good Luck) is Bob Barnes, who is some sort of undercover CIA operative (I think) and ends up pissing off everyone back in the states, so he's sent back to do a desk job he doesn't end up doing (I think). Matt Damon is Bryan Woodman, who is a financial adviser (I think) who becomes one for the Iranians (I think). There's also a lot of other things going on where people dislike others all due to oil. Can't you see how everything is connected?
Gaghan (who won an Oscar for adapting Traffic and has also directed that cinematic masterpiece Abandon) is trying desperately to replicate that multi-layered plot structure that served him so well in Traffic (which I have not seen), but doesn't come off very well. There's so much going on at one time, it's impossible to really follow the storyline. There's characters fleetingly mentioned in the beginning who come back to give an Oscar speech at the end and is supposedly a center for much of the action in the movie. There's harrowing plot occurrences that they say affect the rest of the movie, but actually don't. There's Chris Cooper completely unused, which is a crime in and of itself. That's not the worst part, though. It seems that Gaghan had fallen in love with the script which he had written, and after seeing how it didn't congeal on film, didn't do anything to fix it. Instead of trying to possibly create a bridge between storylines, almost all scenes in the film act independently of each other to make almost no connection between anything that happens in the movie.
I do have to say, though, it is an interesting concept, and if it had all worked instead of being nauseatingly confusing, Syriana would have been a spectacular movie. It's a topical subject, and some of the points the movie was trying to raise were interesting Yet everything was put to waste and made ineffectual because of the movie's inability to be coherent.
Gaghan, although he can't write very well (it seems like the big "corruption" speech at the end is very similar to the "greed" one in Wall Street), can get good performances out of his actors. Clooney shows that although he was in Batman and Robin, he's a good actor. He always seems to get immersed in whomever he's supposed to be playing, and he does it again here. Matt Damon (the better half of Damon/Affleck) also acts well, as do all of the other actors. Yet despite this, the characters are impossible to remember or understand, since the movie is put together in such a terrible way. The only character we really get to know is Bob, and even him we know little about.
Syriana's not a horrible movie. There're thought-provoking ideas that are strewn about and said emphatically by the actors, yet the ideas can't sink in because you're still trying to figure out how the movie gets to point A to point B by going through point P.
Rated R for violence and language.
Review Date: December 29, 2005