There’s very little that’s cinematic about Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford’s first directorial outing since 2000’s The Legend of Bagger Vance. That’s par for the course; as a director, Redford’s rarely interested in doing anything more than a slow pan establishing whatever landscape his characters are wandering in, or whatever urban environment environment they happen to be inhabiting, before getting down to the far more interesting business of what they’re saying or doing. Lions for Lambs begins wandering over a section of Washington D.C. before delving into the first of what essentially amounts to three intercut plays: Tom Cruise as a pro-war senator being interviewed by Meryl Streep’s liberal journalist, Redford as a political science professor giving a private lecture to an errant student (Andrew Garfield), and a pair of Redford’s former students (Michael Peña and Derek Luke) who decided to put their money where their thesis was and have signed up to fight in Afghanistan.

There are varying degrees of political movies and message movies, but it’s difficult to mistake Lions for Lambs for anything but a polemic. As Redford himself articulates, this isn’t an antiwar movie so much as it’s an anti-apathy movie, but it’s pretty clear which side of the debate he’s on.

The actors are not playing characters so much as mouthpieces. Tom Cruise’s lines are an amalgamation of everything George W. Bush has said the Americans are doing right in Iraq, while his defense of North America’s prescence in the Middle East could have been taken from any similar Stephen Harper speech. When Cruise explains the Americans’ latest plan, and how this one will succeed where others have failed, he’s as articulate and convincing as Donald Rumsfeld. Streep’s lines are equally formulaic, a summation of everything the progressive media has been saying about America since they first invaded Iraq. When the interview is over and Streep confesses to her boss that she thinks Cruise’s plan is doomed, it leads to another exchange where she’s silenced like every other journalist that has come before her. Her boss isn’t happy to do it, but hey, that’s the nature of the business.

The problem is Cruise’s ideas aren’t articulated with any passion, either as written or delivered. They’re a cynical left-wing take on what George W. Bush has been saying. Whether you agree with him or not, there’s no doubt Bush believes what he says. And editors in Streep’s boss’s position tend to view their decisions as a matter of integrity; they wouldn’t act as if they were leading themselves to the gallows.

As part of a movie, Luke and Peña’s story is most compelling. This is partly because their time in Afghanistan is intercut with flashbacks from their time in Redford’s classroom, and these are the only sequences that couldn’t have been reproduced easily on stage. More importantly, however, as Peña and Luke present their arguments the other students laugh – and articulate – their disagreement, and we’re given the real sense of a lively debate, something the rest of the movie is sorely missing.

As any good debate student knows, when presented with a topic, whatever your views, you should be able to write an essay arguing for either position. It’s the same with the best message movies. A good message movie (like Requiem for a Dream, American History X, or Traffic), or at least a movie with the right approach to its message (such as Crash) will accurately present its issue with arguments in favour of both sides, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusion. Granted, the ethics of war is a far more thorny issue than drug use or racism, but by setting up the pro-war side as a blatant straw man argument, Lions for Lambs will seem painfully taxing to anyone who has supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I like messages with my movies, I am American and I hate the so-called war on terror. I enjoyed Lions for Lambs, but like Sicko I can’t help but feel it was simply preaching to the choir.






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