Syriana

I have the same feeling about Syriana as I had when I saw Traffic years ago. The movie has lots of stuff going on, very important stuff, very detailed, very well done, but it is just way too much. Syriana is exhausting. Written and directed by Traffic's Oscar winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, this is a fictitious movie based on Robert Baer's non-fiction book See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism.

The plot is very convoluted, with around a dozen characters playing in around five or six different stories, all with the same idea: global politics, oil business and the corrupt US government.
We have George Clooney as Bob Barnes, a CIA spy in the Middle East. This is the character that is supposedly based on Robert Baer. He sells some weapons to terrorists, kills terrorists, and then gets double crossed by the CIA and is brutally tortured by more terrorists. All while he tries to find out what it is that he's been doing for the government so he can learn why is he being attacked now. We know nothing about his personal life though, so there's nothing to care about him.

There's also Matt Damon as Bryan Woodman, an energy analyst in Geneva, Switzerland who gets power giving advise to an Iranian Prince about oil politics, thanks to a personal tragedy. Amanda Peet plays Bryan' suffering wife Julie. The Iranian Prince is Nasir Al-Subaai, played by Alexander Siddig. He's possibly going to be given the power by his father, so he's trying to figure out what to do with his politics. He wants to go with the Chinese, which would be better for his country, but that would mean to go against the oil companies and the US government. He's fighting for the throne with his brother Hamed Al-Subaai (played by Nadim Sawalha), who is all for continuing like they are now.

And then there's Jeffrey Wright (brilliant in Angels in America and also Broken Flowers earlier this year) as Bennett Holiday, a big time Washington, DC lawyer working on the merger of two big oil companies fighting for Middle Eastern territory. In this story we have Chris Cooper as Jimmy Pope, one of the companies' CEO and Christopher Plummer as Dean Whiting, the head of Bennett's law firm. There are also William Hurt, Mark Strong, and a couple more people somewhere in there. Bennett's got personal problems too, as his drunken father (played by William C. Mitchell) daily visits him which embarrasses him.

The acting is pretty good, but nobody is really excellent, meaning that I won't be nominating any of these people for any supporting Oscars. Is the movie smart? Of course it is, maybe too smart. You get all these data and information and we are supposed to feel angry about current world politics, but that's about it, because we truly don't care about any of these characters. Maybe a little bit about the young Pakistani men and the working father, but with a movie out there now like Paradise Now, the suicide bombers in this movie don't mean much. And so I couldn't get myself to like Syriana. Same happened to me with The Constant Gardener earlier this year, the movie is technically excellent, but it's just not enjoyable.