"Lions for Lambs"

Robert Redford rips into the media, the government and our own liberal passivity in this remarkably rousing film.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Tom Cruise, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Reviews

Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise in "Lions for Lambs."

Nov. 9, 2007 | "Lions for Lambs" is just about everything I hate in a movie: It's self-righteous, didactic, dramatically and visually static and, in places, extremely boring. But I found myself thinking about it for hours, even days, after I saw it, which is more than I can say for most of the politically themed fiction movies -- "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" -- that have trickled quietly into and out of theaters this fall.

"Lions for Lambs," I'm afraid, is destined for the same kind of trickling. This isn't so much a movie as an impassioned plea -- on the part of director Robert Redford and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan -- to think about the nature of citizenship, to think about what it means for anyone, on the right, the left or anywhere in between, to serve his or her country. The idea of "serving our country" is almost always used in a military context. But one of the things "Lions for Lambs" strives toward is finding a new frame of reference for that phrase. All of the movie's characters -- two soldiers, close friends, stationed in Afghanistan; an oily Republican senator and the wily journalist who spars with him; a history professor who's trying to jolt one of his most promising students out of his cocoon of privileged complacency -- have to work out the phrase's meaning on their own. That each comes up with a different answer is the point. Whatever the movie's flaws are, it has at least a modest grasp of the sprawling mess we call democracy, which Winston Churchill called the worst form of government, except for every other.

Tom Cruise plays Sen. Jasper Irving, a beaming crocodile in an expertly tailored suit who has invited veteran TV reporter Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) into his office to spoon-feed her a news story about a secret military mission about to take place in Afghanistan. Actually, it's already a done deal. When she asks, "So when does it start?" he replies, "Ten minutes ago," a response that's a command masquerading as a suggestion: She'd better find a way to sell the initiative to the public, because there's no rolling it back. He's got her in his pocket -- not one of the roomier ones, but the tight little watch pocket on his waistcoat -- and even though she goes through the motions of tangoing and sparring with him, he knows it. The network she works for -- like every network -- cares more about profits than about actual news. In the midst of that, Roth pretends that she's hung onto her principles, but Irving knows, even better than she does, that she's really just hung them out to dry and wither. (Cruise's performance here is interesting, if not good, and the movie doesn't cast him as a cut-and-dried villain: He's a nightmare right-wing version of John Edwards, as if Edwards' casual likability and lawyer's showmanship had been turned up several notches to a blinding level of brightness. And Cruise is simply well-suited to play a slick politician: This is one area where being a grown man with blazing-white chipmunk teeth is an asset.)

"Lions for Lambs" tells three interlocking stories: While Sen. Irving and Roth engage in their semi-flirtatious battle of wits, two soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, Ernest Rodriguez and Arian Finch (Michael Peña and Derek Luke), prepare themselves to be deployed on the mission Irving has so casually outlined from the safety and comfort of his office. And over on the West Coast, at a university whose idyllic setting seems better suited to a holiday than to hard work (through the windows, we can see palm fronds outside), professor Stephen Malley (Redford) meets with one of his brightest students, Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield), a kid who's aced all his exams but who, by the twilight of the semester, has bothered to show up for only eight classes.

The university scenes -- most of them take place in Malley's office, between those two characters, although another, even more dramatically satisfying one, is set in a classroom -- are the backbone of "Lions for Lambs," maybe because they provide the best stage for Redford and Carnahan to explore the distance between privileged students (many, though not all, of whom are white) and the kids who have volunteered (either out of a desire to serve, a lack of opportunity at home, or probably, in many cases, both) to fight in the Middle East. I use the word "stage" for a reason: "Lions for Lambs" is more like a play than a movie. Its ideas spill out line after line in the characters' dialogue; this is a movie dense with ideas and low on action. If it were a stage play and not a movie, your well-informed, culturally astute friends -- those who can afford to spend money on such things -- would see it, love it and come back and tell you that you must see it, which, of course, you wouldn't. (I wouldn't, either.)

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