Geopolitics and mainstream film

Less flashy but more substantial than The Constant Gardener, I found Syriana to be intelligent and provocative—an unassuming and impassioned yet labyrinthine melodrama. Though it flirts with moral ambiguity, the film is very clear about who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. The fact that some of the good guys are perceived to be, at first, bad buys doesn’t make their purity of intent any less romanticized. The film requires great patience but the rewards are there . . . indeed, the film’s climax is quite exciting and suspenseful. I will also point to the fine ensemble work among the actors (in particular, the young man who played the Pakistani terrorist in training).

19 thoughts on “Geopolitics and mainstream film”

  1. Some thoughts on Syriana and The Constant Gardener and so on:

    Jeff said, “Less flashy but more substantial than The Constant Gardener, I found Syriana to be intelligent and provocative—an unassuming and impassioned yet labyrinthine melodrama. Though it flirts with moral ambiguity, the film is very clear about who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. The fact that some of the good guys are perceived to be, at first, bad guys doesn’t make their purity of intent any less romanticized. The film requires great patience but the rewards are there . . . indeed, the film’s climax is quite exciting and suspenseful. I will also point to the fine ensemble work among the actors (in particular, the young man who played the Pakistani terrorist in training).”

    I want to push on the point about substance in these two films, ‘though I will start right off by saying they’re both very, very worth seeing–as entertainments, as idea films, as accomplishments in acting and direction and sundry cinematic techniques. I was gripped by Syriana for its first two-thirds, as I sought to untangle its narrative web–and I enjoyed the film the whole way through.

    I think both films are lacking in substance, or more precisely lacking a substantive political complexity at the level of narrative. Both films set up complicated echoes of colonialism, asking (demanding) that viewers recognize and read the historical conditions which lead to the films’ respective views of Corpo-politics. Syriana, admittedly, is far denser in the level of background information available to the attentive viewer–Damon’s character throws one line out about Ataturk and Faisal which is never elucidated and probably eludes many viewers. (And, yes, I’m sure I missed a lot, too, not being as knee-deep in awareness of the region’s history as I wish.) Both films entangle the plots in narrative confusions–so that untangling the plot echoes the untangling of “the plot”–reading the films becomes an explicit performance of reading power.

    That said, once the (narrative) plot emerges, the vision of power revealed is at the level of character pretty clear-cut, as Jeff says. In both films, good is good, bad is very bad indeed. Whatever confusions of story catch us up, there is far too little confusion about right and wrong for my tastes. For instance, I was frustrated by the “good Arab” sheikh (Alexander Siddig)–whose patent virtue made the villainy of Oily America “easier” to spot. But I don’t need the twirling of mustaches or sermons, particularly in a film so keen on the vicious entanglements of power.

    Then again, even as I bitch about the ultimately simple politics of the films, I think I’m really bitching about the ultimately simple formal/narrative aesthetics of the film. I wish for a complexity of character morality in keeping with the complicated pleasures of narrative/film syntax in each . . . but that’s a different kind of politics. Some might say an aestheticizing of politics, where the academic complains about agit-prop, while the activist might be far more interested in a broadside than confusion.

    I am excited to actually see rich, complicated narrative structures in mainstream thrillers, even more excited that it’s coupled with a strong political and moral sensibility. But I think I went in hoping for a ’70s film–and neither Syriana nor Gardener esteem the politics of Ashby’s Shampoo in quite the way I might. They challenge the audiences at the level of story and syntax in order to seduce–so that the clear, clean, simple ideas at the film’s centers will take root.

  2. Is there a better example than Shampoo? I understand what you are saying but Shampoo seems to exist in a whole other category. Maybe Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown?

  3. Sure–any of Haneke’s films will do. American examples are perhaps harder to come by, but what I was getting at was a sense of how business and politics inform and underlie everyday life–which Shampoo, however obliquely, does pretty well. Same might be said for Robert Towne’s other screenplays of the period, too. Or Altman–he may be far better yet.

    But I’m still struck: the explicit attention to economy/politics tends, in American films, to lead to more clear-cut messages. Save the Tiger (or a few other Jack Lemmon movies, too). Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar is pretty good, too–but it’s not quite the same.

    And I had gone into Syriana with Alan Pakula in the back of my head–that ’70s paranoia…. but those films make “power” an abstraction; their politics are in the shadows, rather than complex.

  4. i agree with reynolds that complex narrative structure without a nuanced (i.e. equally complex) approach to the issues/characters is a bit of a waste. though it *is* fun. too bad, again, that syriana’s message is so cut-and-dry. the deepest line i caught (i caught about 50% of the dialogue — too fast and mumbled) is the line in which the matt damon character tells his wife that praising the family culture of the arabs is a racist thing to do. you don’t get that a lot.

    this of course is a debate that already happened in this forum, but it is interesting to me how issues of racism and cultural understanding are dealt with in a movie that, because of who is producing it for what audience, is itself tottering the line of cultural colonialism.

    for an american movie released in year o’ bush 2005, this is in any case a remarkably progressive one. i mean, it literally *asks* you to root for the two pakistani kids suicide-attacking the large ship! it would have been nice, perhaps, not only to portray the arab side as not-all-bad, but also to give some room to the intertwining of good and evil in the corporate-run universe (that in which we all live and which made this movie possible). i am no fan of the corporate world, but it’s simplistic, and ultimately patronizing, to represent the arab world as economically and ideologically dominated by the boys in washington.

  5. I was really very impressed with ‘Syriana.’ Setting aside its politics for a moment, there are powerful, restrained performances from almost every actor, the visuals as the scenes shift from Tehran to Geneva to Dubai and to Maryland are often stunning, and the soundtrack is subtle; you can barely hear it at times, but it manages to convey the location of the action at the time.

    I read the scene Gio refers to differently. Damon doesn’t say it is racist. Peet asks if it is racist, and Damon responds, well, yes, but maybe it is OK if what you are saying is positive. It it deliberately left open. That is an important debate (which takes place in practically every college classroom) and they capture it in 15 seconds.

    As for the politics, yes there are good and bad guys. But it was the inevitability that struck me (and which made this more like a 1970s Pakula movie than perhaps Mike felt). When the old sheik tells the “good” son he is anointing his brother as heir, it is with a world weary recognition of the simple balance of geopolitical power. At the end of the day, things seem to unfold as they do not because of the actions of greedy men, but because of the simple mechanics of power.

  6. just got back from syriana so finally read this discussion. to tell the truth i found it a little blah. it was gripping enough i suppose but the reveal was not very revelatory. well, perhaps i’m not the right audience for this.

    some quibbles:

    *terrible, terrible accents and hindi/urdu pronunciation by the actors playing the pakistani characters. could they not find some pakistani or indian actors who actually speak hindi/urdu? and the language itself in their lines was all over the map–a mix of registers etc. it really distracted me. and how did the pakistani kids get indoctrinated by the arabic speaking egyptian when they didn’t speak any arabic? in fact, in an earlier scene at the docks it seemed like the one pakistani character was speaking to an arab on the docks in arabic, at the end of which conversation he was told he needed to learn arabic.

    *what the hell was up with the family re-unifications ending? damon comes back to wife and son, wright has mini-reconciliation with drunk father. was the movie trying to make us feel better? or was this supposed to feel ineffectual against the labyrinthine evil just detailed?

  7. hey arnab, i wondered about the accents, too, and i also wondered whether the pakistani kid was getting indoctrinated in arabic or pakistani (or whatever it is they speak in pakistan). accents bother me tremendously in movies that have scenes that take place in italy, when the “italians” speak like americans whose italian is really bad. it ruins a movie for me. also, they always get the regional accents wrong, which is a capital scene in italy, because you’ll have a person in venice speak with a roman accent, which totally doesn’t work.

    the personal touch at the end of syriana is totally hokey, and i think all the human interest angle should have been lost. it’s not doing anything there. why did the kid have to drown. unnecessary and distracting.

    and chris, i think we read that “racism” conversation the same way. i think damon says, “well yeah” and then he adds, “but i guess it’s okay if it’s good.” except i took the second sentence to be uttered by damon only to make his wife feel a bit better. and indeed, of course, it is less racist to say “they all love their families” than to say “they all smell funny.”

    anyone notice old alexander siddig from deep space nine? he had such a lousy role in DS9, whereas he’s so smashing and authoritative here. and he’s aged so well! i’m always happy when tv actors of lousy shows get decent screen roles. did you guys notice marina sirtis in crash? she was in startrek: the next generation, and in crash she has the most humiliating role. they must have paid her 50 bucks for it.

  8. I’m not sure why Damon’s kid drowned; it moved the plot along, as a dead child will.

    But I’ll defend the ‘family’ endings: I think, particularly for Damon’s reunion, it is an explicit marker of failure, of the American retreat “home”… and to follow (and close the film) with Wright and father is not a happy closure but a marker of how much is wrong at home. (The unexplicated problems of American race and class emerging–if obliquely–in that relationship, that neighborhood.)

    I’m willing to buy, as well, Chris’ defense of the film’s politics. That’s a smart take: the film isn’t interested in the individual–it’s interested in the system–so my desire for “complex character struggles” is misplaced.

    That said, I’m still a wee bit frustrated that the film wasn’t … well, better. It’s rock solid, but not challenging to any but those less likely to see the film, any way. Put another way, I didn’t feel implicated by the film–and I have a guilty streak 8 miles wide, so it’s easy to hook me into feeling like a failure, yet the film’s sense of a political-economic quagmire did not make me question my own complicity or situation much at all.

  9. All true, all good comments. But I think the political point of this kind of movie is precisely that “we” can’t do anything, except perhaps throw sand in the wheels to slow down the machine a little. The furious action of Clooney is all to naught as the missile still kills Siddiq and Clooney himself. The contrast between the clatter of the soundtrack as his SUV bounces across the sand, and the near silence as the CIA methodically target Siddiq’s car captures the futility of man against machine. Imagine what a piece of crap the movie would have been if he had saved the day.

    That is not an empowering kind of politics, but it may be true nonetheless.

    I can’t speak to accent, but the point about language was surely that the person who recruits the two Pakistani boys is himself Pakistani and speaks Urdu. They then learn limited Arabic at the Madrassa in order to read the Koran. And note the moment at the beginning when Bob realizes that the second missile is going to Arabs, not Iranians because the guy with the gun does not understand Farsi. I liked the cultural melting pot of the workers at the oil refinery and the recruits at the Madrassa.

    Like Mike, I think the family endings worked, and part of the reason is because nothing is actually resolved. We have no idea if Damon and Peet will get back together, or if Wright and his father will reconcile. To return to the point about the film’s politics. In a world in which the geopolitics is out of our control. All we are left with is privatization: to bury ourselves in our families.

    Jeffrey Wright: damn he’s good.

  10. Speaking of Wright: everyone knows they ought to see him in Basquiat, right?, but also check out Ride with the Devil, where he is yet again fantastic.

  11. I can’t speak to accent, but the point about language was surely that the person who recruits the two Pakistani boys is himself Pakistani and speaks Urdu. They then learn limited Arabic at the Madrassa in order to read the Koran.

    no, the guy who recruits them (the light-eyed egyptian) is not speaking hindi/urdu and is not pakistani. i am almost positive that he speaks arabic but i know he is not speaking hindi/urdu. the actors playing the pakistanis seem to be brits (of south asian origin)–i deduce this from their few television credits on imdb. in this small way the film repeats the global logic it seeks to critique. i thought those characters’ narrative was particularly weak–i didn’t buy their indoctrination at all.

    and i didn’t want clooney to save the day–i liked that he blew up right after his blockbuster movie ultimatum to plummer. but despite mike and chris’s reads of the damon narrative ending, which i suspected might have been the intention, i still find it quite hokey. if the point was to suggest the haplessness of the individual in face of the machine i don’t think we needed to go all the way into the house with him, see his son leap into his arms and the reconciliation with amanda peet. the wright ending is more ambivalent but also more “up” than anything we’ve seen with him in the rest of the film. i think there was a failure of nerve and a need to give the audience some measure of hope at the end. the fact that it locates this hope in a retreat from the world into the home can be read critically as you suggest, but by positioning it the way it does (both chronologically and in tone) i think it weakens the impact.

  12. I too was bothered by the “happy” endings–wish the thing had stopped right with the oil tanker explosion (or whatever that thing was). I agree with arnab that the filmmakers offer up a “failure of nerve and a need to give the audience some measure of hope.” It was also cheap sentiment.

  13. from here:

    BREAKING LANGUAGE BARRIERS

    Throughout the making of Syriana, it was of the utmost importance to everyone involved that the film achieve the greatest degree of realism and cultural and regional accuracy possible. Throughout the film, many of the characters speak fluently in their native languages, while others speak languages other than their own, but inflected with the appropriate accent for the character’s place of origin. Great care was taken to ensure that not only the words but the accents and inflections were accurate.

    “It was important to all of us that the Arabs in this movie be portrayed as realistically as possible,” explains producer Georgia Kacandes. “We were sensitive to the fact that people’s language is a point of pride to them and we wanted to show that respect to the Arabic people who would be watching this movie. Otherwise, it would be like having someone who’s supposed to be from Brooklyn speak with an accent from Mississippi. At the very least, it takes you out of the reality of the movie; at worst it makes it appear the filmmakers didn’t care about the people they were representing.”

    well, i’m sorry to say that for this hindi speaker at least, they failed utterly with their pakistani characters/actors. on which, from the same source:

    Wasim is played by Mazhar Munir, a young actor making his major motion picture debut in Syriana. Born and raised in London, he has appeared on several British television series, including the award-winning Doctors.

    seriously, why not hire a pakistani or indian actor who is a native speaker? they do exist, and they all speak english as well, so it wouldn’t be a problem on set.

  14. OK, OK. I doth protest too much. But, hey, it’s Christmas so cheap sentiment is what we should expect.

    Speaking of cheap sentiment, I just got back from seeing Narnia with my eight year-old.

    Maybe Spielberg will have the integrity to save us from cheap sentiment, though nothing in his filmography gives me confidence that he will. I eagerly await a report on ‘Munich’ (which, sadly, I cannot persuade either of my children to see with me despite telling them it is about the Olympics and maybe they would see some soccer).

  15. I can’t add much more to the conversation except to say that I agree with Reynolds. I wanted the film to be better. It could have been, had the film not ended with so many trite “endings”–as if the film was saying to us “and now let us brings all of this to a close.”

    Some thoughts on dialogue:

    The “blockbuster ultimatum” scene Arnab alludes to was, I thought, pretty good. I love how Plummer undercuts Clooney’s threat with “Beirut rules?” A cut to Clooney, who has a look on his face that told me he was fucked.

    Gio, I too was struck by the dialogue about praising the family culture of the Arabs. Again, the line was undercut, this time by Damon (who we can hardly say praises his family…”70 million for the other boy?” was a good line, too). And Mike, Damon’s son was electrocuted, wasn’t eh? I knew something bad was coming when that boy was tauntingly shoving Damon’s son towards the pool’s edge and Damon held back, being told (by his wife) not to interfere. Pool. Son. Father. Hmmmm…Yes, Mike, it moved the plot along. Imagine what a dead wife could have accomplished?

    I thought Jeffrey Wright was good, but the role didn’t allow him to do much. Couldn’t understand why we had the alcoholic father sub (not even) plot.

    How could Clooney have “saved the day”? If he had pulled the Prince from his SUV, what would that have accomplished? The Prince’s fate was sealed when his father did not choose him. Actually, “saving” him would have been a great ending had it been coupled with the young terrorists’ attack on the tanker: two bold acts that accomplish absolutely nothing.

    My last bit is along the language/accent line: I watched this film right after viewing Battle of Algiers again. The latter is far superior, and it uses Algerian actors and extras speaking Arabic. Would it have been difficult for the filmmakers of Syriana to make a little extra effort for similar authenticity? I should add that I did not notice the inaccuracies pointed out by Arnab and Gio. I’m a dumb, white American–and I suppose the filmmakers figured that, like me, no one would notice or care.

    And why do people continue to say that Algiers was a “documentary account” or “shot in documentary style”? It’s neorealist. So there.

  16. Syriana: Best movie of the year that I saw. And I didn’t see much in theaters this year. The accents obviously didn’t bother me, but I don’t discount the complaints Arnab and Gio have them.

    I am a little weary of all the reviewers saying how “complicated” the film is. Wha? It really wasn’t very complicated at all. (They said the same thing about the equally clever but straight-forward Eternal Sunshine). I didn’t get what Clooney hoped to accomplish in his last actions, other than to remind the Prince they had met before in an elevator, but other than that…

    I havent seeen Munich – and won’t see Munich until DVD. I’m tired of Spielberg/John Williams’ Cinema of Manipulation. (I bet there’s plaintive and haunting klezmer melodies among all the slow string parts.)

    I mention that only b/c Syriana also has the score of the year. That guy is good. I didn’t like everything about this film, but I liked it a lot, and am glad it got made and seen by some.

  17. It’s strange that the longer the thread about a particular movie, the worse it seems to get.

    One comment on the comparison of ‘Syriana’ with ‘Battle of Algiers.’ ‘Algiers’ is a very fine movie, regardless of how it is classified, and it is one DVD release that has really useful material on the bonus discs. You could teach a class on French colonialism from the accompanying documentaries.

    But ‘Algiers’ is about how violence breeds violence: how colonialism creates resistance, and has a logic that leads to torture; and how national liberation struggles lead to escalating warfare and ultimately terrorism. The two standout scenes are the clinical accounts of the women preparing to deliver bombs to civilian locations, and the remarkable speech by the French colonel to journalists justifying torture.

    ‘Syriana’ is not about the consequences of violence, and it is only tangentially about terrorism. It is fundamentally about interconnectedness, about how actions in corporate boardrooms, or government offices, or even swimming pools, shape the lives of ordinary people in way that are often unanticipated. If there is a parallel to ‘Algiers’ it is that market capitalism breeds violence, but even that theme is muted. The dizzying shifts of locale combined with a story in which whatever happens in one place shapes when happens everywhere else, is what drives this sense of… a certain kind of bastardized globalization, I suppose.

    That may be why the Pentagon showed ‘Algiers’ to its cadet corps and intelligence unit, but ‘Syriana’ probably won’t be playing at the officers’ mess.

  18. I wasn’t really trying to connect the two. I just mentioned Algiers because of the issue raised by Arnab and Gio about Arab language/accents.

    I think Frisoli used Algiers in one of his classes. How’d it go ‘ol Bean?

    “It’s strange that the longer the thread about a particular movie, the worse it seems to get.” What does “it” refer to? The thread or a particular movie? Hope you meant the latter, though I can’t imagine you did since Mauer just called Syriana best movie of the year. I disagree (maybe I’ll have to see it again), though I do agree that it has the best score.

  19. I meant the movie (and I wrote my comment before Mauer posted his). There is just this, perhaps natural, process whereby initial adulation is qualified, then defended, and emerges at the end tainted. I should know, I contributed to the process in my initial comment on ‘Crash,’ and that ended up as poop.

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