Lions for Lambs
You’re not alone if you feel like Hollywood just noticed this fall that the country is at war and it’s not going well. You could call the studios cowardly, and you wouldn’t be wrong, although the lumbering pace of production is just as much to blame. What upsets me more is that so far, Hollywood’s attempts to make a statement about “the Iraq” have been as clumsy and inept as Miss Teen South Carolina’s. First there was Paul Haggis’s crude-but-still-pretentious “In the Valley of Elah,” and now Robert Redford chimes in with “Lions for Lambs.” Ripped-from-the-headlines cinema doesn’t suit Redford, whose work as a director tends toward the methodical and stodgy. But “Lions for Lambs” isn’t just tedious – it’s hardly even a movie. It’s more like the worst play of 2007. A full two-thirds of this shamelessly contrived triptych takes place in two different offices, and Redford does nothing to energize the visual or dramatic texture. In each office, two people talk. Redford, in a lazy performance, plays a college professor trying to challenge a smart but apathetic student. The other office at least has Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, the latter as an ambitious Republican senator who gives forceful and eloquent voice to the hawkish perspective. But the anti-war crowd needn’t fret: “Lions for Lambs” argues predictably and feebly that the fight can’t be won, as we see from the fates of two excessively noble soldiers in Afghanistan. Redford is so eager to martyr them that it’s unseemly, and his muddy, incoherent filmmaking provides the final insult.
LISTEN: Lions for Lambs