[lbo-talk] Syriana

[Mark Bennett]

Sounds about right.  Matt Damon, not Brad Pitt, was the energy analyst.
Was he part of the assassination plot?  Did Jeffrey Wright throw the US
Attorney his boss, Hewitt or the Christopher Plummer character?  Or
both?  The ship the jihadists blew up was the tanker that was filled
during the ceremony relaunching Connex in Syriana.  I think.  I liked
the film, although an HBO-style series fleshing out many of the
plotlines might be preferable.  

And belated congratulations to Liza, Doug, and young Ivan.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org
[mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of andie nachgeborenen
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 11:50 AM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Syriana

Saw it, thought it was good but agree about the overly intricate,
confusing narrative. With some effort I could follow some of the main
lines of the story -- people who can fill in gaps and correct errors
please do so:

1. Evil oil cartel wants to engineer unlawful merger which attracts the
attention, for some reason, or the US Attorney's Office rather than
Justice Antitrust (sorry, lawyer's bone to pick). As part of price of
this, ambitious rising lawyer throws them dispensible executive of
client and, to further his own ambitions, his boss.

2. In Syriana, an imaginary gulf oil state that is wasting its
resources, the old emir is deciding the succession among his two sons,
Son #1 a good pro-democratic modernizer with (expressly) Mossadeq-like
aspirations and evidently a short historical memory, who wants to give
women the vote and use the oil wealth for economic development, trade
with China, Son # 2 a stupid and corrupt puppet of the US who is happy
to have the multinationals lay his country waste as long as he and his
immediate circle stay rich. Son #2 wins. Son #1 begins to engineer a
coup.

4. When the merger goes through (I think), foreign oil workers from
Pakistan, among other places, are laid off and locked out in Syriana;
threatened with deportation, several of them join a fundamentalist
Islamic madhi to learn to become suicide bombers.

5. Brad Pitt is an energy analyst who becomes advisor to son #1, hoping
to get rich and do good at the same time.  His son dies in an accident
at the pool of Son #1's palace; his wife goes back home with the other
child.

6. George Clooney, a CIA agent who keeps trying to alert the agency to a
missing missile that in fact the agency has borrowed against need is
sent on a somewhat opaque antiterrorist(?) mission in Lebanon somehow
connected with all this, where he is captured and tortured by bad Arabs,
abandoned by the CIA, repatriated to deal with bad Americans, figures
out that Son #1 is in mortal danger, gets to Syriana while the coup is
getting started only to be blown up, along with Son #1, by the CIA with
its missing missile, which is acting in collusion or support of the evil
oil cartel.

7. The laid off Pakistani oil-workers turned jihadists turn their
fishing boat into a flosting bomb and blow up a ship (an oil tanker? A
US Navy vessel? in the harbor of Syriana's port.

I thought it was a pretty good film from Le Carre country -- moral
ambiguity and bad guys all over the place, corrupt institutions and
crooked governments hand in glove with ruthless industries and greedy
businessmen. The cinematography had the edgy. jumpy feel of Traffic.
(It was also directed by Tim
Gaghan.) Brian complained that it wasn't pretty, but I'm not sure that's
the point. 

Is it a leftist film? Well, insofar as a film critical of powerful
institutions is leftist, I guess, not insofar as there is any suggestion
of any way out, much less any collective action leading to a way out.
The only collaborative resistance in the film is provided by the
jihadis; the hope it suggests is provided by an enlightened would be
ruler who basically wants to promote Chinese capitalism as a
counterbalance to the US variety and who models himself on Mossadeq.

Will it alienate the audience? Hard to tell. The on-line reviews seem to
be running pretty good. Will it eductae the audience? Harder to tell. It
may convey the impressions that if the US continues to support corrupt
oil regimes that will encourage terrorism, that the CIA is full of
heartless bastards in collusion with big business, and that the oil
companies are vile and crooked.  Is any of this news?
Maybe I'm naive to think that everybody knows this already, although I
suppose dramatic repetition doesn't hurt.

--- mike larkin <mike_larkin2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> Saw this over the weekend. Had terrible trouble following it. Did 
> anyone else see it? Maybe I'm dense, but I just couldn't get the point


> of it and judging from the conversation among the film goers 
> afterward, I wasn't alone. What's the point of doing a leftist film if


> you alienate your audience?
> 
> 
> 		
> __________________________________________
> Yahoo! DSL - Something to write home about. 
> Just $16.99/mo. or less. 
> dsl.yahoo.com
> 
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

		
__________________________________________
Yahoo! DSL - Something to write home about. 
Just $16.99/mo. or less. 
dsl.yahoo.com 

___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk