Body of Lies

The back­ground is this: Friday night on the way home, some dum­b­assed yup­pie on the bus was yak­ing loudly on thie phone about how he didn’t want to see it, because he didn’t need to see another movie about how bad America was. The yup­pie in ques­tion later went on to sug­gest An American Carol instead, appar­ently pre­fer­ring Naked Gun direc­tor David Zucker to Ridley Scott.

Spoilers below.

The thing about Ridley Scott is that he’s Tom Clancy with a cam­era, and has been going all the way back to Aliens (space marines are James Cameron’s inven­tion). The vil­lains are who­ever the pro­tag­o­nist is fight­ing, and occa­sion­ally the pro­tag­o­nists’ boss for get­ting in their way or stab­bing them in the back. So there is a huge gulf of poliitcally-inspired mad­ness to cross in order to start com­plain­ing about Ridley Scott being insuf­fi­ciently patri­otic. It’s also pos­si­ble that the film is being adver­tised as some­thing other than it really is.

The pro­tag­o­nists’ bosses, to be sure, dole out a large dose of arro­gance and incom­pe­tence. Russel Crowe’s char­ac­ter seems equally inca­pable of rais­ing his chil­dren as he is at com­plet­ing any sin­gle on-the-job task, but that’s pretty much how it seems like “The War” is being fought — a bunch of peo­ple with­out a clue what is going on, flail­ing about with high explosives.

There is also Scott’s trade­mark mud­dled heavy-handedness with the moral­ity moments: the pri­mary antag­o­nist announc­ing “Welcome to Guantanamo” shortly before tor­tur­ing DeCaprio — which trig­gers flash­back sequences of DeCaprio watch­ing U.S. forces tor­ture a pris­oner to death. The appar­ent final moral­ity of DeCaprio resign­ing in dis­gust to go off and earn the trust of his new Iranian girl­friend is equally heavy-handed. Scott wants you to get the point, but he doesn’t want to just come out and say it. So you end up with a lot of teas­ing to get you to say out loud what he was thinking.

It just comes off as irri­tat­ing since all the morals are things you’ll hear repeat­edly if you both­ered to read any­thing about the sub­ject: “Bush Administration is tremen­dously incom­pe­tent,” “Torturing pris­on­ers puts U.S. POWs at risk of being tor­tured,” and “Americans have a long way to go before any­body in the Middle East trusts us.” There’s no secret insight to any of this. None of these morals are rad­i­cal, or anti-American — I’m fairly cer­tain most of the mil­i­tary lead­er­ship today agrees with these sentiments.

The issue of the entire mil­i­tary intelligence-oriented frame­work of the U.S. efforts to stop Islamic-oriented ter­ror­ism is brought up in the first line, only to be explic­itly brushed aside. I sup­pose that’s really the ulti­mate moral of the movie: don’t get your hopes up when the first thing that hap­pens is a main char­ac­ter try­ing to con­fine your range of accept­able thought.