The music during the closing credits of Robert Redford’s new message movie about contemporary politics, Lions for Lambs, is a soft but unmistakable (and earnest) rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” At that point, and at several others, you want to tell Redford and everyone else responsible that this is a ridiculous thing to do in a film made after 1947. They probably wouldn’t get it if you did.
In his first directing job since The Legend of Bagger Vance in 2000, Redford, it seems, was going for urgently political, but confused it with humorless and wildly preachy. Besides decent acting and the reasonable run time, nothing redeems the movie from this central fault.
From what I’ve read about the film’s background in the Financial Times and then filled in with assumptions, I believe this is how the movie got written and made: Oblivious screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan decided that America needed a trenchant and uncompromising wake-up call about the war — no, the country and the world at large — so, perhaps acting as a vessel for some muse, he wrote The Script that fit that description. He joked about sending it to Robert Redford. But you don’t just not send that sort of script to Robert Redford. So he did. Redford and whoever else signed on paid attention to the script’s message rather than its execution, and a movie was born.
To get its point across, the movie fights for the hearts and minds of viewers on several fronts, cutting between three separate settings: the offices of a California college professor and a senator, and an Afghan battlefield — during the same hour of the same day, in near-real time. The style, sincere, talky and static (the soldiers lay in the snow with their legs broken for most of the battle scene), would be much better suited to the stage.
Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep have the most watchable of the three setups. Young senator Jasper Irving (Cruise) tries to convince journalist Janine Roth (Streep) that his new Afghanistan strategy will win the war on terror. Irving attempts to gain credibility by shooting straight about the past: “We made mistakes,” but his next move is to ask Roth to believe that a strategy similar to the one that failed will work. Cruise does a fine job with it, sustaining his forceful Republican body language and glinty eyes throughout. He’s always good with driven, perhaps-unstable types, and makes Irving and his sleazy-ish tactics seem alive. Streep acts suspicious throughout, and it works, but it’s a shame that’s the only note in the script for her to hit. The four main characters, in fact, all seem more like two or three adjectives rather than actual people. (Redford is wise, weary and worried; the young student played by Andrew Garfield is bright and lazy; Cruise, hawkish and ambitious; and Streep, experienced and skeptical.) This is a lot of what makes the thing so dull.
On the other coast, Dr. Stephen Malley (Redford) lectures his student Todd Hayes (Garfield, confident and competent) about the importance of civic engagement. He recounts how two of his former pupils, Ernest and Arian, took his lessons about engagement to heart and shipped off to Afghanistan. Talking to Hayes in the film, Redford makes it clear that he wants us outside the film, the college students of America, to do something, using harsh phrases like “Rome is burning, son.” The dialogue makes up the movie’s most heartfelt point: Believe in something, and act on it; it’s better to try than to sit on the sidelines. You can’t really argue with it, but it’s not justification for a movie.
The office scenes sound dry because they are. The arguments just don’t add up to anything substantial. Nothing would be wrong with a dialogue-heavy political film if the dialogue were informed, or brought new arguments into the picture, or even if it were just believable and dramatic. The political discourse, though, is like a visual op-ed that runs down points that were relevant months or years ago. There are about seven Iraq films out now or soon, and, unlike in them (or in, great movies in general), the story isn’t built around characters but chatter.
We do get some semblance of a physical manifestation of all the talk: Two soldiers in action — conveniently the ones about which Malley was just speaking, Ernest and Arian. We see flashbacks of them in college, caricatures of sympathetic All-Americans: poor, bright, hardworking minorities who (no, seriously) play baseball and thirst for change. In a patriotism-rousing climax, they fight in a shadowy Afghan snowfield under the senator’s new battle plan.
The movie makes for strong caution against other Hollywood types who might try to affect politics in some way beyond campaign donations. Some details are just weird. Hayes gives a random commentary on the irony of a black character’s being named Arian (It’s pronounced like ‘Aryan’). First, this is utterly pointless. Second, the word “ironic,” by most definitions, does not apply in the situation. Third, it causes “Professor Redford” to say something like “At least he had the courtesy to spell it with an “i,” which is also pointless. The number of moments like this, along with the weak characters, lend the whole film a hasty, thoughtless quality. It’s as if the movie got made on the strength of a single selling point that appealed to all of Hollywood — “It’s liberal, but it’s patriotic, too” — and no one really cared what happened as long as they stuck to that motto.