Lions for Lambs

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Lions for Lambs could very easily be a stage play. The film presents us with three parallel, interconnected stories, all running in real time (about an hour and a half). In the first, Robert Redford plays a college professor who calls a once promising, now lazy student into his office to find out why the kid’s been skipping his classes. In the second, a reporter (Meryl Streep) interviews a rising senator (Tom Cruise) about a new strategy in Afghanistan. The third, in Afghanistan, stars two former students of Redford’s professor (Michael Pena and Derek Luke), enacting the senator’s new strategy.

It’s all very talky. In the beginning there are some typical war movie scenes in the Afghanistan segments, but soon the two soldiers get stranded and injured on top of a snowy peak, surrounded by the enemy, and the film basically settles into three concurrent conversations.

I’ll say it again: it’s a stage play. But, of course, when you get Redford as a director, and you land Cruise in a rare supporting role, you stop worrying about which medium the project is best suited for, and you make the darn thing.

Luckily, Redford is quite talented behind the camera: the film is polished, it has an intensity that never eases, and the dialogue (from a screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan) skillfully cracks and pops and bristles along at a quick pace.

The skill and style of the dialogue doesn’t, however, conceal that much of the conversations’ actual subject matters are filled with old, tired, and often simple-minded liberal rhetoric. It’s the film’s main failing, and for a dialogue-driven film, it’s a big one: these are arguments we’ve heard time and time again for a good three years. Why did we invade Iraq when we should’ve focused on Afghanistan? Why are rich men deciding the lives of young boys from air-conditioned offices? How did we squander all our international goodwill after 9/11? Etc, etc, etc, etc.

To its credit, the film is willing to exploit some of the holes in the left’s armor, namely the way democrats rolled over and let the Iraq War happen without a second thought. The film’s real target isn’t necessarily the conservatives, but the public apathy (embodied by the college student) that allows politicians to get away with everything. Of course, inadvertently or not, that simply strengthens the left vs. right dynamic by painting the left as apathetic everymen and the right as rich, shadowy, evil conspirators.

The mountaintop storyline goes absolutely nowhere, but its given the least amount of screen time; the best segment of the film is the Cruise vs.