Because Body of Lies deals with a very messy and convoluted
issue-the intelligence community's war on terror-it only makes sense
that the movie itself would end up as a convoluted mess. But
producer/director Ridley Scott manages to translate William Monahan's
script (in turn translated from David Ignatius' book of the same
name) into a messy finished product that works...almost.
In its favor are a handful of astute cultural and tactical
observations that prompt consideration. One such nugget is found in the
opening monologue delivered by Russell Crowe's Ed Hoffman. He concisely
sums up the difficulty of this war, being that the enemy has gone
lo-tech with his communications making tradionitional CIA surveillance
tactics nigh impossible (a revelation that, as I shall explain shortly,
seems lost on him for the rest of the film).
The film also boasts a selling performance by Mark Strong, whose
portrayal of Hani Salaam is the standout performance in the film. His
penetrating eyes and deadly-serious earnestness add gravity to the film
and save it from its acceptable, but not stellar, leads.
While many critics are harping on Crowe's bad Southern accent, it was Dicaprio's ranting a la
The Departed channeled through a Southern-ish accent that was
distracting for me. Even still, it is not their performances that
really weigh the material down, but the writing of the characters.
Whomever the culprit, whether Ignatius or Monahan, his blunder is
to craft characters so inconsistent that they reek of fabrication. As
mentioned before, Hoffman so clearly understands the inner-workings of
these terrorists, but for the rest of the film, he blunders along,
compromising missions and forgetting his enlightened bit of wisdom at
the film's beginning. During the climax, when Dicaprio's character
faces off with the elusive terrorist he has been hunting, he indulges
in that most p.c. of practices-preaching that terrorism has
nothing to do with Islam. It is one of those moments where a character
in a film becomes possessed by the writer, and you can almost see the
writer in the character's eyes, staring out from his keyboard into the
camera and right at us to insure that we understand, "This is not a
movie that bashes Islam, but extremist terrorism and the West's
terrible foreign policy."
Of all the movies that question the way America does things,
Traffic was, for me, the most successful. Though guilty of some
oversimplifications perhaps, the film made a cogent case for a new way
to fight the war on drugs. The films since then that have addressed the
war on terror have yielded ever decreasing returns. Rarely is a
feasible alternative presented. While Body of Lies tries hard to show
that this war would be better served on the ground, it talks out of
both sides of its mouth, making sure that it does not offend people in
the Middle East, but like almost every other film covering our troubles
East of the Med, has no qualms flagellating ourselves without giving
any realistic idea of what our next step should be.
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