(Caution. I arrived ten minutes late and was drunk...)
The most confusion occurs over Bennett Holiday (Jeffery Wright) the immaculately dressed black lawyer, since it is very difficult to tell who he is talking to and what his role is. I think the confusion is intentional so that the audience can't figure out who is part of the DoJ, who is an oil company honcho, and who is just another sleazy lawyer.
In other words, in a world of total corruption, there is essentially no difference between oil industry deals, government regulatory oversight, DoJ scrutiny, and influence peddling lawyers.
The other confusion, which I think is also intentional are the shifting roles of covert terrorists, middle eastern government agents, CIA arms dealers, assassinations, and the madrass schools who recruit the unemployed and imported young oil field workers.
Notes. The stinger missile Clooney is chasing is taken by the jihadists and is mounted on the fishing boat the young laid off oil field workers, turned jihadistas, aim at the natural gas tanker.
The CIA is running a killer drone (not one of Clooney's missiles) from a satellite link and imaging the motorcaid.
Benett Holiday (Jeffery Wright) works for Dean Whiting (Christopher Plummer), principle in Sloan Whiting law firm. The firm was hired by Connex to steer the meager with Killen.
It is a very good movie. But. Big but. It doesn't quite reach the top mark, mostly because (IMHO) the intertwining plots are too confusing. I think it needed a re-write. What separates it from Le Carre is that LC worked the plots over until they meshed like gears. Even if you did not understand what was going on in LC's novels, somewhere around page three hundred something you did, and that point of enlightenment was arranged to correspond to some point just before the climax---which was followed by a smooth, cold, cynical coda ending. It is also a classic technique that Dostoevsky used in novels like The Possessed where almost a dozen different characters all collide on the fateful night and then run off to their separate fates---some of which are absurd, some horrible, some silly, leaving the town a wreck for the inept and clueless mayor to clean up.
Syriana needed that kind of meshing gears---an automatic transmission---and it more or less gets there with a clunky manual, but not quite. I might have to see it again to figure out if it works. I think the way to perform this feat is to have at least one character follow the interconnections and find himself left with his own complicity in the assassination, the merger, the sellout, and the terrorist attack.
This requires somebody the audience can identify with who is moved from some intermediate point of insider knowledge and complicity to a final realization of what he or she has really done. Clooney as Bob Barnes, almost gets there, when he tries to warn off Prince Nasir's motorcaid, but they are both blown up so that understanding is erased.
In the middle of the film Bennett Holiday (for Connex) attempts to pressure Killen's lawyer (or lobbyist) with a threat of turning over information to the DoJ. The lawyer/lobbyist Danny Dalton (Tim Blake) makes a nice speech about corruption to Holiday in the middle of a causeway surrounded by big corporate/government buildings:
``Corruption charges...corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the street. Corruption...is why we win.''
Well, yes of course.
But what most of the US public doesn't seem to grasp is that every policy, every action, and every top official of the Bush administration functions ONLY at the level of total corruption. There is no non-corrupt official in the Bush administration.
It isn't a matter of breaking the laws. The administration in power literally doesn't know how to `govern', so they just make it up to fit what they want to do. Of course laws are broken---by default. Who knew there was a law against doing that?
Just as I could never figure out how an administration could lie so much, and finally concluded they can't tell the difference between a lie and a fact---because they abolished facts altogether---so too with corruption. They don't know or care how the executive branch of government is supposed to work, they just `do things'. In effect they have absolished goverance. They make their own `reality' and let lawyers like John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales sort it out later.
>From Bush's first `election', through his bogus `war', onto his latest
totally illegal NSA wiretap expose, there is no law---they just
make it up as they go.
Against this `real' backdrop of the total corruption of government, where thousands of people have been killed, with hundreds imprisoned, tortured or out right murdered for absolutely no reason, and a constant drone of mass corporate frauds---with government collusion---on a titanic scale in the hundreds of billions, a movie like Syriana just pales by comparison.
CG