Lions for Lambs -- Great Cast, Name Director, Good Movie?

Lions for Lambs is Robert Redford’s most overtly political film, and there is no pretense about the film’s intention to stake its terrain firmly on the left side of the political and ideological landscape. It not so subtlely critiques the Bush Administration’s policies on the Iraq War to raise questions about future American policy, challenges us to think about the decisions we make when we’re too young to know the right choice; and for a moment pretends to offer commentary on the age-old adage from Alexander Hamilton, “those who stand for nothing, fall for anything.”

The film centers on three scenes involving a liberal journalist’s interview with an ambitious Republican senator, an aging political science professor’s conversation with an underachieving and jaded student, and two idealistic young soldiers trapped on a mountain outside of Afghanistan.

Meryl Streep delivers the best performance in the film, portraying a journalist on the downside of her career. Her eyes, gestures, and posture reflect a woman who is beyond disbelief and whose disillusionment and mistrust of the U.S. government eventually compel her to carry such heavy sadness and frustration on every part of her being. Tom Cruise, looking a bit older and accomplished in a dark suit and power tie, is adequate but not quite Streep’s equal in their scenes. Cruise’s bloated persona and his wars with the media in recent years make us cringe and nod at his senator’s ambition and arrogance. Robert Redford is bland and benign as the all-knowing college professor determined to steer a student towards attending classes, studying, getting good grades, and clean living—all one needs to find happiness and success in this world. And as the American soldiers in the Iraq War, Derek Luke and Michael Pena are given such lightweight sketches for characters to play that regardless of their characters’ plight, we are virtually numb to any emotion their scenes are designed to elicit.

Although it is only 90 minutes long, the film feels at least one hour longer. Matthew Joe Carnahan’s dialogue is stilted and appears to be written to state the film’s core messages over and over again. The six main characters are so thinly conceived that the audience is robbed of the experience of learning characters’ motivations, watching them evolve, and then becoming emotionally involved with them and their actions—all the things that make going to the movies worth, well--- going to the movies. The actors, and by-default the characters they portray, become mere props for political protestations and proclamations about the Bush Administration, government, institutions, and of all things the American media. Each of the characters state their piece over and over again and never veer from their respective points of view.

One would have thought Redford would have treaded more carefully than to accuse the American media of backing the war in Iraq, yet he does so repeatedly, nearly suggesting that the failings of the U.S. policy in Iraq is as much a fault of the American media as the Bush Administration. This is the ultimate failing of the film. To my recollection, no journalist from any of the major American networks or newspapers with the possible exception of Fox News (and that might even be a stretch) ever sold the war to the American public as Redford so stridently contends. Lions for Lambs not only delivers the same notes at the wrong chords; it flat out delivers the wrong notes!

Lions for Lambs is clearly experimental filmmaking and should be recognized as such. But it lacks the necessary narrative thread to expound upon its themes to add credence to its challenging positions. The constraints of the script never allow the ideas articulated by its characters to become external. The film is bold in its conception yet flawed in its execution and its inability to transfer the power of its ideas to impactful images. At this point in Redford’s distinguished career, he’s earned the right to make such an experimental film, though. He’s the Sundance Kid who essentially founded the Sundance Film Festival, which in many ways redefined American cinema. In Lions for Lambs he’s violated his own principles, though, and created a film that deprives its audience and defies convention, all for the sake of creating its own truth.

Grade: C-