Axel Foley
Posts: 731
Joined: 15/10/2005
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Que?
Anyway I'm adding my two pence worth...
Lions for Lambs is a film of ideas and ideals. The title derives from a WWI German general's quote relating the British generals with lambs issuing orders that sent their men (read lions) into battle and to their death. These ideas and ideals are presented via three different stories, which no matter how hard director Robert Redford attempts, do not knit together.
Story one involves Tom Cruise's over-ambitious Republican senator, Jasper Irving, who has called a meeting with Meryl Streep's journalist, Janine Roth, to inform her of his “big idea” to solve the Afghanistan debacle. His concept involves sending out platoons of Special Forces to secure key points around the Afghan border and is to be initiated by men such as Ernest (Michael Pena) and Arian (Derek Luke) whose platoon we then follow into enemy territory. Finally, there's Redford himself as Stephen Malley, a politics professor trying to get one of his students (Andrew Garfield) to realise his potential.
This last thread offers the opportunity to drop in names like Socrates and Plato, as Redford tries to drive home a point about how politics and democracy have fallen since the Classical age. Garfield can't be bothered anymore because he doesn't trust the likes of Irving (who in truth is pretty darned shifty), but Malley wants him to accept that kids like him represent hope and that, if they put their minds to it, they could make a difference. And indeed they can, because Ernest and Arian were two such kids, but in order to make their point they are now at the sharp end of Irving's crusade.
Where the film gets messy is in trying to connect Irving and Roth to the piece. He's a crafty bugger and, besides throwing in a few digitally tweaked pictures of him fraternizing with Bush and his cronies, there doesn't seem to be too much scope for his character. Roth, meanwhile, acts as his conscience during their chat: she incisive in her inquisition and he coming across as more Tony Blair than any Stateside honcho in his righteous defence, which seems to read in line with our former PM's humanitarian intervention manifesto.
However, none of this tells us anything we don't know already from the other pieces (with our own eyes we have seen the soldiers sacrificed). Moreover, too much of their conversation seems to amount to easy liberal point scoring. To wit Roth delivers some cutting comments about the similarity to 'Nam and a dig about invading Iraq, while the real enemy was allowed to recover and ultimately Irving shows himself to be exactly the sort of slime ball that bothers Garfield so much.
As such the film overall is very slight and there is far too much rambling discussion. Moreover, it's superficial and stagy and many recent documentaries have covered much the same ground, but with greater depth and cohesion. The strongest scenes (and in fairness some of these are indeed powerful) involve Pena and Luke, who symbolize all soldiers, out there on the front line making a stand. A stronger film would have fleshed out their story more and got the point, about lions and lambs, across without any recourse to spelling it out for those taking notes. As it is the film feels like an assignment that one of Malley's students has put together: undoubtedly high-minded and well intentioned but far too verbose.
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Lions For Lambs - 
Why film of the week??? Empire cowards - 
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