Movie Review: 'Lions for Lambs'
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Tom Cruise stars in "Lions For Lambs" -
Meryl Streep and Robert Redford discuss a scene before the cameras roll in "Lions for Lambs."
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Robert Redford has elevated social, ethical and personal values to major-movie relevance over the years and is doing so again, after a seven-year absence from directing, with "Lions for Lambs," a potent meditation on some ordinary and extraordinary people caught up in -- or studiously avoiding -- George Bush's two current wars.
Redford himself takes the role of professor Stephen Malley, who, at the outset, reads the riot act to a gifted but alienated student (Andrew Garfield) at a nameless college in sunny Southern California. Malley tries to inspire him with the story of two former students, Rodriguez (Michael Pena) and Finch (Derek Luke), who lacked Garfield's privileged upbringing but believed in the American dream.
- Starring: Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford
- Rating: R for some war violence and language
- Web site: lionsforlambsmovie.com/
In a nutshell, they took idealistic Malley's advice to do something significant with their lives, enlisting in the military to join the battle against Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Three thousand miles away in Washington, a charismatic young senator (and presidential hopeful) played by Tom Cruise is giving an exclusive interview to a veteran TV journalist (Meryl Streep) -- revealing the administration's bold "new strategy" for victory. It involves sending small Special Forces teams deep into the Afghan mountains to secure positions ahead of the spring thaw.
"When will this start?" Streep asks.
"Ten minutes ago," Cruise replies.
Cut to a Chinook helicopter attempting to land in dangerous territory. Finch and Rodriguez are on it. The chopper is hit. Badly wounded, they find themselves trapped on a snowy mountain, surrounded by the enemy.
The idea, cutting back and forth among the three "battlefronts" and three sets of characters, is that they'll cross-fertilize each other. Indeed, the combat scenes (weirdly watched by satellite, too) are agonizingly tense -- Pena and Luke heartbreaking in their struggle to stay alive -- while the verbal ping-pong match between Cruise and Streep provides ongoing star power.
The brash, hawkish senator believes America's credibility "as a force of righteousness" is at stake. The cynical reporter wants to know why we sent 150,000 troops to a country that didn't attack us and one-fifth as many to one that did. Streep has a great meltdown scene, back at the office, over her own ambivalent ineffectiveness.
Redford as the sage-like prof turns out to be fairly ineffective, too, at least with Garfield. Their static encounters suffer from excessive polemical yakking. Everybody talks a lot but nobody seems to change anybody else's mind. Most of them remain enigmatic -- lions who came in roaring but go out less like lambs than lost sheep.
The film's title, by the way, derives from a comment of a German officer in World War I about the bravery of British soldiers vs. the incompetence of their commanders: "I've never seen such lions led by such lambs." It doesn't take a genius to infer Redford's attitude toward Iraq and Afghanistan from that. This is the Sundance Kid's most immediately political picture, a flawed but deeply sincere one. The debate it wants to stimulate is not so much concerned with the wars' justifications as with the personal responsibility of politicians (Cruise is wishy), reporters (Streep is washy), hand-wringing educators and the ever-apathetic public.
No answers. It ends with a question mark ... leaving you to engage or disengage, as you choose. "Lions for Lambs" is about making choices -- right and wrong -- but also about the folly of making no choice at all.
First Published November 9, 2007 12:00 am
