Little story, too much message

By Dan Moore

Published Nov. 13, 2007

That "Lions for Lambs" is overtly political is no surprise. The advertising makes no bones about it being a message movie. The surprise is the movie itself, which features such all-time-great talents as Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, is unsalvageably bad. In its rush to say something meaningful, "Lions for Lambs" forgets to be a movie.

The story, such as it is, is split into three parts. In one, a professor (Redford) tries to convince a slacker student to care about the world around him. In another, a journalist (Streep) discusses a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan with a Republican senator (Tom Cruise). In the last, two of the professor's brightest students, who both joined the army, die in Afghanistan. In lieu of actual momentum, the movie cuts incessantly and needlessly between the three stories to provide an illusion of it.

Its primary flaw is a complete lack of self-awareness. It is so insular in its thinking, so desperate to talk down to an audience that is probably smart enough to make up its own mind without Cruise and Streep arguing last year's talking points, that it is totally unaware of how ridiculous its contrivances look.

The whole thing plays out a little like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," except that it made sense to have such sainted protagonists in a movie about racism. In a movie about political policy, these insufferably precious heroes pander in a way that will irritate anybody, pro- or anti-war, who knows real people or has seen a movie.

Among its paper-thin tropes are the professor with a heart of gold, the slacker genius who appears to have been outfitted during a trip through the set of "Friends" and the two leonine student soldiers, both minority scholarship athletes sacrificing themselves for their beliefs.

But try as you might to find them, there are no real people here. Everyone is a mouthpiece for an idea, and their likeability is not based on their character because they have none.

The whole thing plays out like a bad creative writing class short story, the kind of plotless masturbatory fantasy where the brilliant protagonist-philosopher watches as a bunch of nattering buffoons disagree with him. It is a movie that wishes it were a documentary that had great and terrible things to say about the film's antagonists. But since it is fiction, its characters, good and bad, are straw men, totally useless amalgams of viewpoints far less black and white than conveyed in this movie.

When it comes down to it, "Lions for Lambs" has failed in two ways. Politically, it breaks no new ground. In fact, with the analogue of the fictive new strategy, the Iraq surge, having begun months ago, it seems to hardly break even old ground. Worse than that, unforgivably, it is a terrible movie, meandering and patronizing. If you want to be condescended to by people on both sides of the debate, we're in a college town, and there are plenty of indignant freshmen who will do it for free.