-----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