I went to a wartime thriller, but then a Poli Sci 101 seminar broke out.
The last time I was stuck in a political science class, listening to a beardy guy of about 32 tell me that racists could never be free because they were imprisoned by their prejudices – News I can use! – hearing liberal fantasies was costing me (OK, the ROTC program that was paying my scholarship) about $800 a minute. So an $11 ticket to “Lions for Lambs” is a relative bargain.
On the other hand, if you want to be bored by pompous-assery, “Meet the Press” is free.
Directed by Robert Redford, the movie intercuts among three pairs: A liberal journalist (Meryl Streep) interviews a hawkish Republican senator (Tom Cruise) in D.C.; a hip California professor (Redford) urges a student to take action in the world; and two soldiers, ex-students of the prof, are stranded on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan because of the senator’s idiotic policy shift.
The soldiers don’t get much to do – they’re injured and can’t move, so they’re waiting to be either shot by the “Tallies” in the hills or rescued. Their story takes up but a few minutes.
The lion’s share of the screen time goes to the boring baaing in California and D.C. The Streep-Cruise discussion scales new heights on Mount Banal; apparently Hollywood is so dumb it thinks it can be called incisive simply by having two people hit the talking points we’ve all seen on every TV news roundtable for the last four years.
Streep makes liberal arguments so routine that Streep herself could have written her lines (Iraq never attacked us, we armed Saddam in the first place, the people who planned the war had no combat experience).
Sen. Cruise, who was first in his class at West Point, is meant to be seductive with his spiel (it’s a war for civilization, we’ve made mistakes in the past but we’ve got a better plan this time, we can’t let our enemies claim victory, Iran’s ambitions must be thwarted), but the two of them essentially talk past each other.
(Hint to the senator: When she implies you’re a soft touch because you weren’t in the infantry when you served in the military, now is the time to mention that Lincoln, Wilson and FDR weren’t combat vets either, or that three-war veteran Doug MacArthur would have made a lousy president.)
The only thing maintaining the viewer’s interest is a sort of meta-suspense: Which side will the screenwriter inform us has won? (Hint: The senator has pictures of himself posing with Crueleezza Rice and BeelzeBush.)
Meanwhile, the movie gives as much time to the prof and the student in California as it does to the D.C. scene, as if we cared what these two airbags had to say.
The Redford character, who senses that his young charge is brilliant but lazy, tries to save him with what the movie thinks is a fresh new idea: Hey, son – work for the government! Redford approves of the ex-students who enlisted and wound up in A-stan because they had cooked up some fuzzy Clintonian scheme to save the world by dragooning all high school juniors into serving their country for a year, in uniform or not.
If Redford’s supposedly precocious student actually were the free thinker he’s meant to be, he might reply that, far from being “ignored” by the country, the poorest parts of America are the ones with the largest government footprint: The housing and hospitals tend to be state-owned, many residents have government jobs, and others subsist on government handouts. Clinton did do a lot for poor Americans – by limiting welfare, not by his dippy “AmeriCorps” Eurail pass/résumé polisher for the overprivileged.
“Lions for Lambs” is proud of its fast talk and its big words, but these merely put the script at the level of any barroom conversation between informed adults. It thinks it has a radically different take because it tells us to love the patriotic and duty-bound soldiers (the lions) but hate the empty suits in D.C. (the lambs).
That idea actually makes the film less brave, not more. What could be less controversial than to say I support the troops but despise the ninnies on Capitol Hill?
Running time: 88 minutes. Rated R (profanity, war violence). At the Lincoln Square, the Orpheum, the Kips Bay, others.