Lions for Lambs
Rated: R
Runtime: 1 hours, 28 minutes
Directed by: Robert Redford
Starring:
Robert Redford - Professor Stephen Malley
Meryl Streep - Janine Roth
Tom Cruise - Senator Jasper Irving
Michael Peña - Ernest Rodriguez
Derek Luke - Arian Finch
Andrew Garfield - Todd Hayes
Peter Berg - Lt. Col. Falco
I can’t remember the last time I saw such a smug, self-satisfied piece of garbage as the bombastic, patronizing Lions for Lambs. If America really does hate Hollywood liberals (I honestly don't think most Americans think about them too much one way or the other), this is why. Lions for Lambs is a big, loud, speech about the War on Terror that misses all the nuance and intricacies involved, offers no viable solutions, and makes points that are at least two years old.
Told in only 88 minutes and utilizing three storylines, the film follows a reporter (Meryl Streep) interviewing a neo-conservative hawk (Tom Cruise), a professor (Robert Redford) talking with a malcontent student, and two of the professors former students (Derek Luke and Michael Peña) who are trapped on a remote mountain top fighting for their lives after a failed attempt to implement the hawk's new war strategy. You see, everything is connected if we use these characters! Did you know that media helped sell the war and that now it's our troops who are suffering for their incompetence and willful ignorance? As for the students and professors, they think about things! No one else does, but they sure do!
Lions for Lambs assumes you're an apathetic idiot. Only Hollywood cares (and believe me, this films is 100-percent Hollywood from it's A-list stars to its overblown music that lets you know when a moment is IMPORTANT, to its endless pedantic lectures where characters don't talk to each other but at each other) and stupid red-state America (i.e., everywhere else) needs to listen up. Nevermind that when Michael Moore called out the President's bullshit on Iraq back in 2003 at the Academy Awards, he was greeted with a chorus of boos. Nevermind that this film pegs my generation as apathetic even though statistics show that we are far more politically active than those who came of age in the Reagan-era and we have more access to information than any previous generation in history. We just can't tear ourselves away from our damn big-screen TVs and X-Boxes and Nintendos and hip-hop rap music and our stick-ball and malt shops!
But this film isn't against the troops. It's against the administration, neo-cons, and most Americans, but it loves the troops. If Redford could have digitally inserted wings and halos on to the troops and gotten away with it, he would have.
So what about the nexus of politics and terror? What about the demonizing of liberals? What about the messianic nature of neo-conservatives? What about the shoddy treatment of troops at home? Too many ideas and not enough time to condescend to the audience? Well, there's always Lions for Lambs 2: Didactic Boogaloo!
If anything shows the selfishness and heartlessness of this film, it's that when it ends, there's no end titles to show that as of a certain date, this many troops had died and this many troops had been wounded. No, the film ends with: DIRECTED BY ROBERT REDFORD. He certainly deserves all the credit for making the first film that made me embarassed to be a liberal.
Words by
Matt Goldberg
10.12.07