Stultifying ‘Lions for Lambs’ frustrates with weightless abstractions

It’s no coincidence that the director of Lions for Lambs also cast himself as a professor of political science. The screenplay for the fall’s latest war movie (the second written by The Kingdom’s Matthew Michael Carnahan) is structured like a couple of Socratic dialogues, with cheap-looking action sequences to remind us of the consequences of political talk. If this sounds stultifying, well, it is. Except when a picture of Tom Cruise (as an oily Republican senator) is Photoshopped into a manly hug with George W. Bush: According to the preview audience I saw the movie with, the sight of an evangelical hugging a Scientologist is comedy gold.

In the first dialogue, Robert Redford’s idealistic Professor Malley stages an intervention with a floppy-haired frat boy (Andrew Garfield) who’s been skipping his classes. The frat boy is sassy, but Malley appeals to the memory of two of his former students (Michael Peña and Derek Luke), who’ve joined the Special Forces and are right this minute—wait for the action sequence—being deployed to a dubious mission in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in the second dialogue, Tom Cruise’s senator offers an exclusive interview to political reporter Meryl Streep, who still feels bad about the way her network sold the invasion of Iraq. The scoop is an incomprehensible new strategy involving “forward points” in northern Afghanistan—cut to a sorry mockup of snowy mountains, with Peña and Luke being stalked by faceless “Talis” after they accidentally fell out of their helicopter. Oops.

The most aggravating thing about Lions for Lambs isn’t its earnest attempt to instruct. It’s that Carnahan didn’t do the research that would’ve made the details remotely plausible. Streep’s reporter voices bland liberal reservations about war, but she doesn’t ask a single question about the way the senator’s vaguely worded “strategy” might play out, or about the Afghan “hearts and minds” he intends to win over. Despite its topical veneer, this is a movie about pure, weightless abstractions: apathy versus action, moral courage versus careerism. It’s hardly a fair debate.

LIONS FOR LAMBS DIR. ROBERT REDFORD | RATED R | AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE

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