Lions for Lambs

Review

Despite its reputation as a hive of blame-America-firsters whose luxury homes were (to paraphrase right-wing commentator Glenn Beck) well and truly immolated, Hollywood hasn’t been especially responsive to national crises in decades. And given the box-office fates of A Mighty Heart, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, and (probably) Lions for Lambs, it might be 30 more years before some liberal executive says, �Hey, let’s put our movies where our mouths are.� The new antiwar pictures are all clunks and wind, but they’re full of fervent acting and affectingly rough�they lack the usual studio overpolish. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is the clunkiest, windiest, and roughest of the lot. Most of it is dead on the screen. But its earnestness is so naked that it exerts a strange pull. You have to admire a director who works so diligently to help us rise above all the bad karma.

The film is a call to engagement in the face of a catastrophic war, the architects of which are criminally indifferent to the lives being lost. It jumps among three different story lines�although jumps might be the wrong word. Plonks? Thuds? In D.C., Senator Tom Cruise proclaims to investigative journalist Meryl Streep a bold new strategy for winning the war on terror. (�We made mistakes � How and why is not the issue. Now we have to move forward.�) Moving forward consists of sending a small plane full of soldiers over snow-capped Afghanistan mountains, where it’s promptly shot up, and where two nonwhite Americans (Michael Peña and Derek Luke) hurtle to Earth and face off against a horde of Taliban fighters. Somehow the two are connected to California professor Robert Redford, who has summoned slacking-off student Andrew Garfield to his office to discuss the young man’s failure to live up to his talent and social responsibilities. (�They bank on your apathy, they bank on your willful ignorance � How can you enjoy the good life when Rome is burning?�)

As usual with this sort of message movie, I kept wanting to shout, �Right on!,� but the words somehow came out as groans. (�Right on!� is not a phrase that can be groaned.) Cruise was obviously cast to give the b.s.-spouting Republican pol some weight, but he can’t help telegraphing that he doesn’t�as an actor�believe a word he’s saying. He’s patently phony, a pip-squeak upstaged by his teeth. Redford’s teeth are even more distractingly big and white, but at least he believes what his character is saying. Streep gives her thesis lines some subtext. She uses her head voice�piped through her nose�to suggest she’s thinking, and she knows how to keep busy. (I bet she’s really taking shorthand.)

The title is from a German general’s World War I observation of English soldiers bravely sacrificing themselves by the tens of thousands, which Redford solemnly quotes to the unengaged student at the climax of his argument: �Never have I seen such lions led by such lambs��i.e., know-nothings who send others out to fight and die. To which I say, Right ohhhnnnerghhhhhhhhhhhhh. — David Edelstein

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