As a measure of how seriously George Clooney is now being taken as an actor and not just a heart-throb, there has been much comment on the fact that he deliberately gained a few fleshy kilograms for his role in the oil-industry drama Syriana.
Such attention to physique may obscure the fact that Clooney co-produced the movie too, a sign that is he now a major Hollywood force — and he’s not quite the mainstream ‘apolitical” type Hollywood prefers. This year, Clooney has Oscar nominations for scriptwriting and directing for Good Night, and Good Luck, as well as for best supporting actor in Syriana, and both movies are up for best picture — surely a record-breaking feat. Focusing on Clooney’s expanded gut may be a way of sidestepping the implications of such an achievement.
In any case, it’s not like his actorly weight-gain for Syriana is in the same class as Robert de Niro’s famous self-ballooning for Raging Bull, or that of Charlize Theron in Monster, or even Christian Bale’s opposite effect, losing an awful lot of kilos for The Machinist. Clooney, in fact, just looks like he would look anyway if he gave up the Hollywood star’s relentless exercise regime and Oprah diet and let himself go for a few months. Oh, and let his beard grow … Now, that’s a real innovation.
In Syriana, Clooney plays Bob Barnes, a CIA field agent caught up in lots of complicated espionage business; in the Middle East, it can be hard to tell who’s on which side. Mind you, that goes for the CIA itself, it seems.
The movie is partly based on a book by former CIA officer Bob Baer, but the Barnes storyline is just one of several in the movie, which is written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, Oscar-winning scriptwriter for 2000’s Traffic (directed by Steven Soderbergh), a similarly multi-storyline look at the drug trade in the United States and part of South America. Gaghan uses the same basic idea to deal with the oil industry, though without Soderbergh’s convenient colour-coding of the different parallel narrative lines.
There are the scheming, ruthless oil barons and the migrant workers of the oil fields who are driven to extreme measures. There is the investigator examining the books of a big oil company and thus facing the inevitable temptations. There is the young Middle Eastern princeling who has modernising ambitions for his desert state, and there’s the investment analyst who gets pulled into his plans. Spread across these roles are many a top-list Hollywood player, all working as part of a well-coordinated ensemble. Nonetheless, the Clooney/Barnes storyline emerges as the heart of it all.
Gaghan has made a sterling attempt to paint a portrait of this industry and its global manipulations from top to bottom, and Syriana is engrossing and informative viewing. Within the overall frame of a political thriller, it keeps all its balls in the air with the style and skill of Robert Altman, who more or less invented this kind of multi-narrative movie, though there’s no echo of Altman’s essentially freewheeling approach, where you get the sense that things are often teetering on the brink of uncontrollable disorder. As it would, coming from a serious scriptwriter, Gaghan’s movie feels tightly controlled.
At the top of the largely unsavoury heap depicted in Syriana are figures such as Christopher Plummer’s, Chris Cooper’s and Tim Blake Nelson’s captains of American industry. Blake Nelson’s character delivers the now-famous lines that sum up the movie’s central thesis about this kind of figure and his role in the oil business: ‘Corruption ain’t nothing more than government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation … Corruption is our protection. Corruption is what keeps us safe and warm … Corruption is why we win.” Cooper’s character goes hunting for animals trapped in his rural estate, which naturally says something about him. No quails, though, unfortunately — or related accidents. (And pity Gaghan couldn’t squeeze in a small part for Sandi Majali.)
Alexander Siddig, in a smallish but pivotal role, plays the prince who is in line for the throne of his oil-rich country and has plans for it beyond simply milking it for personal gain and pleasure. It’s a shame this country has to be fictional; it kind of goes against the grain of the very convincing realism of the rest of Syriana. Moreover, it is reminiscent of those many mythical African countries invented by authors and filmmakers whenever they feel like it, or when they just don’t feel like doing any research — as though all Africa were a tabula rasa, a blank playground for the Western imagination. Here there’s a hint that the Middle East is being treated the same way. Europe, by contrast, hasn’t had any imaginary countries since Zenda, and that was in 1894.
While watching Syriana, I thought the title must refer to this imaginary emirate (like a mini-Syria, perhaps?), but that is apparently not the case. It seems it’s a Washington think-tank term for various ideas floating around that relate to the reshaping of the Middle East, obviously a hot topic among the Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds and Rices of the world, who have already begun on that great task. So, in a way, ‘Syriana” does indicate an imaginary country — a possible future country (or colony?) born in the fevered minds of American power players and their intellectual lapdogs.
And one wonders, with more than a little fright, what new disastrous interventions the United States may now be pondering. Let’s not even talk about Iran. Like the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, Syriana provokes and elaborates such a reaction. Yet the fact that the movie is so unfanciful, so scarily real-seeming, takes it beyond that category — it feels as though it’s simply filling in some of the detail and the mechanics of a situation we already know about in broad outline. We don’t need to speculate; the conspiracy is real. And we don’t need Syriana to convince us of that.