Lame lambs

National Review, Dec 3, 2007 by Ross Douthat

MIDWAY through one of the three narratives that twine through Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford's hilariously awful drama about the War on Terror, Jasper Irving, an up-and-coming Republican senator played by Tom Cruise, steps out of his office to take a phone call. The journalist who's been interviewing him, print-and-television veteran Janine Roth (Meryl Streep), rises and strolls around the room, taking in the various photographs adorning the walls: Irving with Dick Cheney, Irving with Condoleezza Rice, Irving with George W. Bush. The hawkish senator has spent the first half of the interview trying to sell Roth, a liberal who supported the invasion of Iraq and now bitterly regrets it, on a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. The battering-ram certainty of his rhetoric threatens to carry all before it, but the photos are mute reminders--to Roth, and to the audience--that when it comes to Republicans and military strategy, there are only four words that matter: Don't get fooled again!

Or at least I assume that's the effect that Redford was shooting for. I was thinking: What's Tom Cruise doing with Dick Cheney?

I mean no disrespect to Cruise; his performance, however risible, is nowhere close to the worst thing about this stagy, talky, idiotic film, and it would take a master thespian to squeeze an ounce of plausibility from the lines the script requires him to spout. Lions for Lambs is a rare achievement: In just 88 minutes, it ranges across war, politics, journalism, and academia, and demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the filmmakers are completely, laughably ignorant about all four. Indeed, I commend it to GOP hawks, to be used as propaganda. I have my share of doubts about the Bush administration's foreign policy, but if the morons behind this movie are right then I don't want to be.

The only question is which strand of the story is most embarrassing. Maybe it's the Streep-Cruise tete-a-tete, in which the absurdity of the premise (a new military strategy is announced in a private interview by the Hollywood equivalent of John Thune, rather than in a press conference by the president or the secretary of defense) is exceeded by the absurdity of the strategy itself, which sounds like something my ten-year-old self might have dreamed up while plotting the conquest of the world. Afghanistan will be secured from the Taliban, Cruise's Irving insists, by perching small Special Forces platoons on snowy mountaintops; they'll control the high ground, you see, and thus the country. Naturally, instead of asking follow-up questions like "How will they be re-supplied?" Streep's reporter confines herself to lecturing Irving about how you can't "kill people to help people," and explaining that this is just Vietnam all over again. "Equivocation is defeat!" he brays; she asks him if he's ever heard of The Who, and adds, in case we aren't clear on the point, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." (I'm not kidding: She really says this.) It's like watching Sean Hannity debate Jane Fonda after they both spent the whole day together sniffing glue.

But wait--don't choose yet. There's another laughably embarrassing dialogue to consider, this one between a spoiled, cynical young college student (Andrew Garfield) and the wise, craggy, idealistic Professor Malley--played, of course, by Redford himself. The kid, you see, is brilliant and promising but isn't applying himself. He just wants to have a nice house in the suburbs and drive a Benz; he doesn't care about changing the world. But Redford's professor does, and he's going to tell it like it is: What good is a fancy car, he points out, when America's "streets and highways are becoming Third World?" (And no, I don't think he means "Third World" the way Tom Tancredo does.) "Rome is burning, son," Malley declaims, "and the problem isn't with the people who started it ... It's with us, all of us, who just fiddle!" (I'm not kidding: He really says this.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To shake the kid out of his apathy, Redford's professor tells him a story about two other students he once taught, two working-class heroes (literally) who committed themselves to changing the world instead of just griping about it. Of course, what they did was join the military, over Malley's anguished protestations--but just because their lefty professor hates the military-industrial complex that's shipped them overseas doesn't mean he can't "revere the reason they went." (Message: Left-wing movie stars support the troops too!)

This brings us, in turn, to our third storyline, in which Michael Pena and Derek Luke play the students-turned-soldiers, now stationed in Afghanistan. (Perceptive audiences will note that they're Hispanic and black, while the spoiled-rotten kid hanging out on the home front and being lectured by Redford is white. I think the filmmakers may be trying to tell us something!) Inevitably, they're on the front lines of Senator Irving's bright new strategy, which turns out to be just as dumb as it sounds in a Capitol Hill office. Instead of seizing the high ground, they end up pinned down under enemy fire on an Afghan mountainside, trapped waist-deep in snowdrifts and unable to do anything except fire their weapons, wait for rescue, and (like everybody else in this stupid movie) talk, talk, talk.