Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is a commendable effort to provoke American self-examination; like the politics professor played by Redford himself, however, it may be just a little too teacherly.
There are three parallel strands to the film, plus one measure of explanatory and linking flashback. Two of those strands are made up largely of conversations: a meeting between a Republican senator and a vaguely left-wing journalist, and a serious talk between said professor and a bright but wayward student. The third strand presents an American military action in Afghanistan, while the flashback material relates this strand back to the professor.
Multiple-narrative movies are the new form of serious American cinema, with Traffic and Syriana as templates (and, further back, ancestrally, the works of Robert Altman as pioneer of the form). At least Lions for Lambs has only three main strands, and these three strands are all happening simultaneously in a short time (and hour or so!), so it’s not hard to keep track.
Also, it has heavy-hitting star power. Tom Cruise plays the politician trying to sell a new military plan for Afghanistan (they can’t even talk about Iraq, it seems) to a senior journalist played by Meryl Streep. We’re given both sides of the argument in what appears to be an even-handed fashion, though I wonder whether casting Cruise at all isn’t already a subtle weighting against what his senator represents. We all know Cruise does best as a human action figure, though he did play a charismatic slimeball, with preternatural brilliance, in Magnolias.
His character is supposed to be the new best hope for the future of the Republican Party, and he has the slickness and the jaw-jutting determination. He’s rather young for the job, but if the real-life Republicans found they had a senator with presidential ambitions who was even one tenth as good as this, they’d wet their pants with joy. On film, though, it’s another matter: the senator and the journalist are having a special ‘one-on-one” meeting, and Cruise is up against Streep in a ‘one-on-one” acting class. In such a context, he’s inevitably going to come across as untrustworthy and bogus. He can’t project authenticity and depth of character like she can; when he’s in the same room as she is, he just doesn’t seem like as real a person.
The pseudo-Socratic dialogue of Redford’s professor and his student is more genuinely even-handed, even if Redford and scriptwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan didn’t plan it that way. In trying to counteract the student’s apathy and cynicism, Redford gives himself the voice of liberal decency and wisdom, and he has some telling points. It’s hard, though, not to sympathise with the youth who’s pissed off with all the ambitious ‘pieces of shit” running the country and who despairs of ever being able to do anything about it.
I’d take issue with the professor, too, on his comparison of today’s US army with the British army of World War I, famously referred to by a German general as an army of lions led by lambs. The American army appears not to be led by lambs but by idiots and manipulators, oil-hungry cowboys who lie about their motives and won’t even spend the money to do the job properly.
Still, the professor turns out to be right, in another way, when the parallel strand about the army mission in Afghanistan reaches its climax. Here American soldiers confront death in a way they do not another current film that deals with ‘war on terror” issues, The Kingdom. In that film, it is clear that, whatever geopolitical relevance it may claim to have, the most important thing in its storyline is that American lives are more valuable than those of any other nationals. Americans are so antsy about their soldiers dying that it’s amazing the US can go to war at all; when it does, no one’s allowed to harp on the deaths. In that respect, The Kingdom is wish-fulfilment in a way Lions for Lambs is not.
Lions for Lambs is thoughtful and its star-power may lure some ordinary Americans into Redford’s civics lesson — and out of what he calls their apathy and wilful ignorance. Whether that makes it good cinema, or even good drama, is another question. It really only jerks into full emotional life when Streep’s character has a proper freak-out.
The reader will notice how many times I’ve had to use the word ‘American” in this review. Lions for Lambs is the US doing some soul-searching, or at least Redford asking it to. Good for the US, and for Redford. But the rest of the world is entitled to say, again: America, it’s not all about you.