Syriana

Connex loses its access in Kazahkstan by its Emir which is then given to the Chinese. Connex is merging with the smaller Killen to get back into the region. Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon) is an energy analyst in Geneva. He attends the Emir's party where his son is accidentally killed. Reformer Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) offers him reparation and eventually takes him on as his adviser. Meanwhile, there is a secret missile sale in Iran that ends explosively. Bob Barnes (George Clooney) is a hard-nosed CIA operative trying to stop the arms smuggling. He clashes with his superiors and then assigned to assassinate Nasir.

It's an ambitious movie that would confuse the most fanatical of conspiracy theorists. It's a complicated interconnected series of stories. It's tough to keep it all straight. In this case, the confusion adds to the appeal of the movie. It highlights the murky nature of dealings within that region.

Do you like puzzles? I do. I work crosswords, encryptions and sudoku. I think that's one reason I liked Syriana. But this movie left me puzzled.

Do you like movies with convincing acting, and character development. I do. I think that's another reason I liked Syriana. But who all of the characters were, and what characters were not revealed in the movie left me puzzled.

Do you like movies with mysteries, and with a credible backdrop of events relevant to today's world? I do. That's another good reason to like Syriana.

I think you get the idea. Syriana is a very good movie, but with so many characters and inter-related plots that it is difficult to assemble all of the pieces. You definitely get the main idea though: oil is all-important, and whomever controls oil gets very rich and powerful.

George Clooney, Matt Damon, Christopher Carter, et al., are a terrific ensemble cast that portray their characters very convincingly. Their stories are told separately and coalesce at the end of the movie, much like in "Traffic" and many other contemporary movies. Who are the "good guys" in this movie one may ask. That's difficult to discern. Maybe there aren't any (and maybe there aren't any bad guys either; or, maybe they're all bad guys.) If you decide to attend this movie, pay attention right from the beginning of the movie. And, if you like mysteries and puzzles, try to solve the question of who has the ultimate power among the characters in this movie. As for me, I think I'll have to see the movie again.

In "Syriana," writer/director Stephen Gaghan uses the busy style of "Crash" and "Amores Perros" to illustrate the complex geopolitics behind oil. Each sector--regulators, "intelligence", lobbyists, grease-the-wheel-ers and cogs-in-the-wheel-ers, in the network of greed, idealism, self-interest, sophistication and naiveté, is represented by a different character followed through the movie to bring them together, directly or indirectly, into the climax.

This technique to coordinate a huge ensemble of captivating character actors woven tightly together in a complex story is helped enormously by Robert Elswit's ever-moving camera shots as visually and sound edited by Tim Squyres, who had some experience with overlapping dialog and movement in a more literal upstairs/downstairs on Robert Altman's "Gosford Park." Alexandre Desplat's music adds to the tense mood.

The variegation that Gaghan presents is almost staggering, even more ethically complicated than a Graham Greene Cold War noir. This is the first film I've seen that illustrates the diversity of clashing Islamic cultures and interests, despite that I couldn't keep their interests or motives all quite straight. Though the English subtitles (which are commendably outlined in black for unusual legibility) wipe out some of the distinctions, we can infer that Iranians are speaking Farsi, Pakistanis' Urdu and others speaking Arabic, all with varying fluency and mutual cultural comprehension, let alone manipulators who can speak anything besides their native tongues. We've seen immigrants and guest workers in films critical of Western countries, but not the resentment-brewing conditions of badly treated non-citizens in the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, like the fictional one here which looks a lot like Dubai or Brunei, where clusters of modern skyscrapers contrast with Bedouin goat herders. It does help for background on the fascinating side plot of the radicalized young Arabs to see "Paradise Now" about Palestinian terrorists to explain particular details of their training.

While each character is specifically set within a believable home and family setting, some are painted with too easy and broad strokes. While Alexander Siddig seems to have the monopoly on naively idealistic Arabs, as his similar character in "Kingdom of Heaven" against another Crusades, history is littered with the interim, modernizing liberal tragically caught between powerful forces. (Though the proliferation of Western-educated Arab intellectuals in movies is beginning to sound like all those Japanese generals in World War II movies who went to USC or whatever; at least he went to Oxford and not Harvard.)

Matt Damon's un-Bourne-like energy analyst just sounds simplistic even when he's truth-telling, but we also see that he's already slid down the slippery slope of ethics in the crossing of his personal and professional lives. That so many of the oil and gas executives have Texas accents (superb Chris Cooper, Tim Blake Nelson, Robert Foxworth) does seem to say that the decades of business and political corruption there, as documented in Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, have simply been extended to a global scale.

The film is also unusual in focusing on the role of lawyers negotiating the deals between companies and governments. While Christopher Plummer's Ivy League senior partner type has been seen as a shadowy force in countless paranoid thrillers, Jeffrey Wright is completely unpredictable and tightly wound, though the point of his relationship with his cynical alcoholic father isn't exactly clear except maybe as his conscience. We see before our eyes he goes from, as his mentor says, "a sheep into a lion."

Most films have prosecutors like David Clennon's U.S. attorney as a hero against corruption, instead of being chillingly dismissed as "trust fund lawyers." But the script is so full of such epigrams, like "In this town, you're only innocent until you're investigated," that one character calls another on issuing them too brightly.

While from the beginning I couldn't quite follow all the machinations around George Clooney's character, he is wonderful at transforming from his usual Cary Grant suave to harried, dedicated, mid-level bureaucrat who literally won't toe the Company line in a dangerous hierarchy that's shown to be a bit more competent than in real life, that reminded me both in the gut and guts of Russell Crowe's Wigand in the tobacco wars in "The Insider." It recalls how benign corrupt spooks looked in their personal lives, as there's much conversation here about houses, cars and college tuition. Indirectly, the film implicitly shows the dangers to Valerie Plame from her outing as a CIA operative, as families and personal connections are constantly used as threats and bargaining chips.

Significantly, there is not a single mention amidst all these Mideast chicaneries, plots and plans of the Zionist entity, proving that pro or anti-Israel policies are smoke screens around the main draw -- oil.

Movie-wise, these characters seem a lot like the gangsters and their conseglieres in "The Godfather" carving up Cuba and drug rights, let alone Gordon Gekko extolling "Greed is good" as the ultimate ideology, and fits right in with this year's other geo-political thrillers "The Constant Gardener" and "Lord of War," and those weren't even about natural resources. It works better than the re-make of "The Manchurian Candidate" because even though the focal point is a fictional country the issues are real, not science fiction.

So does this make you ready to get out of your car and onto the train? Because until then, we'll still need lots of that oil from the Middle East.

"Syriana" is a blistering, powerful film about the degree to which governments and corporate conglomerates place the ambition to control the world's oil supply above the well being of their citizens and employees. In this game, there are only bad guys, and what separates the villains from the protagonists is not a question of who's good and who's bad, but rather how bad each is willing to be.

So maybe "Syriana" doesn't tell us anything new. But that doesn't mean its points aren't worth making again and again. And though it is complicated, and I'm not going to pretend I followed every detail of its intricate plot, it's not *that* hard to follow. Stephen Gaghan is a good writer, and he provides a nice summary of the film's action in its final moments.

What emerges from this tangled puzzle is a web of corruption and self-interest, all fueled by the need for oil. In one plot thread, the men behind two soon-to-merge oil companies will stop at nothing to make the merger go through, since the new company will be one of the most powerful in the world. In another thread, the law firm representing the company proves that it's eager to cash in on the company's new economic success. Meanwhile, a power struggle between the two sons of an aging king in an unspecified Middle Eastern country (though Saudi Arabia is obviously suggested) has attracted the attention of the American government, operating through the CIA. America (read American business) has a vested interest in which of the king's sons succeeds him to the throne: It doesn't want the reform-minded eldest son, whose priorities will be building a country to benefit his own people; it wants instead the younger son, who will continue to relegate his country to a cosy spot in America's hip pocket and take its orders directly from the president of the USA. And in the film's most chilling plot strand, we see how the struggle for oil feeds the radical Islam movement in the Middle East, providing young men with a feeling of brotherhood and righteousness in the face of a region they feel has turned its back on them in favor of big business and Western corruption.

"Syriana" is tense, fast and furious. Following it can admittedly be somewhat exhausting, but if you pay very close attention to the first hour or so, as each story is introduced and the relationships between characters become clear, the second half of the movie is easier to digest.

I disagree with other comments here that the characters aren't developed or that the acting is unimpressive. On the contrary, I think all of the actors create extremely nuanced, compelling characters, a challenging task given the fact that none of them are allowed more than a minute or so at a time to feed us information about themselves. A movie like this could easily fall prey to filling itself with a bunch of stock villains, all cocked eyebrows and facial mannerisms rather than full-bodied characterizations, and the fact that it avoids this is a tribute to both Gaghan and the cast. And hats off to the editor on this movie, who had perhaps the most daunting task of the year.

2005 has been full of terse, important films, fresh in their immediacy. There have been a small number of sensational, tough, thought-provoking films instead of a larger batch of more mediocre ones, as has been the case recently. "Syriana" is one of the best movies of the year: it's angry, yet it's not hopeless. I hope Americans see this movie. At this time of year, when people are trampling each other in malls in order to be first in line for Christmas sales, I hope they remember that the vast wealth of America frequently comes at the sake of people all over the world who will never have a fraction of the comfort those in our country take for granted.

Grade: A

Initially I wanted to compare it with Traffic, same style and interwoven story lines, but the film itself stopped me from doing so. Thank you. Comparing films can so difficult, you know, the old apples v. oranges thing. This film stands on its own without the comparison or the similarities to Traffic.

Just before I went to the movie theatre, I saw an interview with Steve Gaghan the director on the Charlie Rose Show, and probably this helped me to fit most of the pieces together. The scene where Bob (Clooney) is taken to visit Hezbollah leaders, is based on the exact experience the director had when researching the story. He said that most of the film was based on his or Bob's actual experiences.

So what do we have....Oil, big oil, oil executives, oil analysts, oil geography, oil politics, big time oil power brokers, CIA, Islamic terrorists, Middle East culture....It's all there. And Steve Gaghan does a very good job in bringing it all together. His directorial debut. Very good acting all round, maybe the oldest boy and his mother Amanda Peet stand out.

I walked out of the theatre in an emotional daze, if that's possible. I will see this film again.

My coda.... What a rotten, ugly barrel of oil.