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LIONS FOR LAMBS Send This Review to a Friend
A strong assault on aspects plaguing the United States comes in this talky but urgent film directed by Robert Redford from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan.
Boiled down, its essence is Redford’s portrayal of a professor trying to convince a disillusioned slacker of a student to do something worthwhile with his life, Tom Cruise as a U.S. Senator shilling for the administration in yet another doomed military gambit in Afghanistan, and Meryl Streep as a veteran television journalist he is trying to use, but who goes to her boss castigating the way the press has been manipulated in the past and bears responsibility for not resisting being conned. Meanwhile, two well-intentioned and patriotic but ill-used soldiers pay a price.
The tragic on the ground consequences of the policy the Senator has helped devise is shown with the idealistic soldiers (Derek Luke and Michael Peña), who enlisted against the advice of their professor (Redford) and are trapped on the ground by the Taliban amidst another U.S. failed mission. That section supplies the only action of the otherwise mostly verbal messaging.
What drives the film is the intelligence of its approach combined with the quality of the performances. Redford exhibits the solidity and earnestness that comes of his long screen experience in trying to talk some inspiration into the student who is practically a dropout. Andrew Garfield gets the student character right with his snippy, challenging responses to his prof’s goading, and his performance dramatizes the malaise felt by many young people who think any input is useless in an atmosphere of corruption and misguided government policies that seem impossible to change.
Cruise is excellent as a slick, full-of-malarkey Senator who denies presidential aspirations, but surely has them. He is someone you shouldn’t want to buy a used car from let alone a shiny new administration military plan doomed to fail like the rest of them.
Streep gives yet another convincing performance, this time as the journalist who is skeptical and wary of being used to foster the Senator’s ambitions and the administration’s desperate move. She projects a mix of qualities—journalistic savvy, an inquiring mind, a conscience and the desire, even at risk to her career, to stand tall this time in the face of her boss who, in keeping with the network attitude, doesn’t want to look closely but prefers to just carry the story fed it.
“Lions for Lambs” requires an audience to meet it halfway and do some thinking. The film is not geared to involve us with excitement, but what it has to say is urgent and the dialogue is worth listening to in the context of where America is today with respect to what we’re being fed in connection with the so-called war on terror. An MGM and United Artists release.
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