You're Sorkin In It

Lions for Lambs is a landmark for me: I think this is the first time I’ve found myself criticizing a big Hollywood movie for not spending enough money. Boy, this is a cheap-looking picture—a segment set on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan is one of the most stagebound pieces of studio filmmaking this side of the cop shows Universal Pictures cranked out in the early ’70s—and the presence of A-list stars like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, and Robert Redford (who also directed) only makes the artifice of the film that much more jarring. It’s a movie that seems like it’s being performed in front of stage flats—you half-wonder why Redford didn’t do away with sets altogether and film it Dogville-style on an empty soundstage.

Or an Off-Broadway theatre. Perhaps there, Lions for Lambs wouldn’t have seemed so talky and inert as it does onscreen, and its unusual structure might have seemed more innovative. Lions for Lambs takes place roughly in real time, in three different locations. In Washington, a hawkish young Republican senator named Jasper Irving (Cruise) invites veteran liberal reporter Janine Roth (Streep) into his office to leak her an exclusive story about a bold new military initiative to take the high ground in Afghanistan; in Afghanistan itself, where the mission has gone disastrously wrong, two injured American soldiers await the rescue helicopter, hoping that the enemy doesn’t get to them first; and on the campus of what the film cryptically refers to simply as “a California university,” glamourous but aging poli sci prof Stephen Malley (Redford) tries to shake one of his students out of glib apathy and into action. (As it turns out, those two soldiers in Afghanistan are Redford’s former students, who were inspired to enlist by his “don’t sit back, stand up” rhetoric.)

Wearing his weathered face and his faded denim shirt with equal pride, Redford is a welcome, charismatic presence as Dr. Malley—only his sixth onscreen performance in the last decade. He brings an amused levity to his give-and-take with Andrew Garfield as his cynical problem student that softens what could have been a much preachier role. And Tom Cruise gives his most focused performance since Magnolia—can it be a coincidence that both roles involve long, tense showdowns with smart female reporters determined to peel away the mask he presents to the public?

Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (who also wrote the much flashier Middle East action picture The Kingdom) is onto something with this script. Anyone who’s ever mocked George W. Bush from the safety of their living-room couch will probably feel their conscience pricked by the film’s argument that criticism that isn’t backed up with some kind of action—what one might call “Daily Show activism”—doesn’t count for much, especially now, when the global stakes are so high.

But Carnahan and Redford’s schematic presentation of this theme throws a wet blanket over the entire film. The script has a bad case of the Sorkins. Like so many scenes in The West Wing, the political debates in Lions for Lambs are too perfectly scripted to be believed—the characters are constantly setting up each other’s punchlines, one argument neatly dovetailing into the opponent’s response, everyone able to summon precisely the statistic or historical quotation at the exact rhetorical moment it’s required. It’s the difference between watching a friendly rally and watching a bloody tennis match—the characters in Lions for Lambs always seem to know ahead of time where the ball is going to land.

Lions for Lambs is the first film Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner have shepherded into theatres in their new roles heading up United Artists, the once-dormant company freshly revived as a boutique studio under the aegis of MGM. I doubt people will remember much about this cautious piece of middlebrow entertainment five years from now, but I doubt whether Cruise is all that worried about looking like a movie executive. If Lions for Lambs is anything to go by, he’s more interested, eerily enough, in looking presidential.