December 10, 2005
‘Syriana’: ‘Realism’ or a Left-Wing Assault
on Oil?
By Dan
Gainor
Oil companies
are evil and the root of that evil is America’s endless thirst
for oil. At least that’s the spin of the new movie “Syriana,”
which the media have called “powerful,” “ambitious”
and “Something you might even call realism.”
The film stars actor George Clooney as a CIA operative as part
of several converging story lines about oil company corruption
and Mideast politics. Critics and journalists have seized on the
story line to speak favorably of its left-wing, anti-industry
message and simply to blast the Bush administration.
In a November
23 Los Angeles Times review headlined “Perils of
capitalism,” Kevin Turan wasn’t subtle about the connection.
“The overarching focus on enhancing reality is in the service
of making us believe that what we’re seeing on screen in
‘Syriana’ just might be happening at this very moment,
that a shadowy, amoral cabal of untouchable Washington power brokers
might be pulling the strings that control the world,” he
said.
Turan claimed that writer/director Stephen “Gaghan uses
the cover of genre picture-making to present a scathing critique
of how America acts to protect its interests, how we try to get
the world to dance to our tune, and what the consequences of those
actions can be.”
ABC’s “Good Morning America” had stars from
the film on back-to-back days before its limited release in late
November. On November 22, while talking to actor Jeffrey Wright,
Diane Sawyer passed along the movie’s view of the oil industry:
“Making a thriller, for instance, about – the oil
business and how it takes everybody’s life who gets near
it, and turns it around and sometimes sacrifices it.”
The previous day, she ended her interview with Clooney urging
viewers to see it. “As I said, it’s pulse-pounding
stuff and a really ambitious movie. Learn something,” said
Sawyer.
What viewers would “learn” was that the film painted
all of the oil men in the film as greedy, corrupt, and thriving
off of the “chaos” America supposedly generates in
the Middle East. The major oil company characters were intent
on pulling off a merger despite breaking the law. Their legal
representatives took the same Machiavellian approach and an energy
analyst played by Matt Damon leveraged the accidental death of
his child into a multimillion-dollar business opportunity. Pakistani
oil workers turned suicide bombers received more positive treatment.
According
to the December 7 New York Times, “Syriana”
is one of the season’s offerings that “have overt
social purposes and activist campaigns attached to their movies.”
“And
while its political attitude is unmistakable – that the
American need for oil shamefully depends on Middle East chaos
– its fleshed-out characters never lecture the audience,”
argued Caryn James of the Times.
In a discussion session
after a December 7 preview showing in Washington, D.C., director
Gaghan said he tried to keep from being an advocate: “I
don’t think anybody wants to be preached to, least of all
by a Hollywood filmmaker.” Gaghan did add that he had a
different, more upbeat ending originally but that offered “too
much hope for these times.”
However, Gaghan has
used the film as part of an effort to complain about American
dependence on oil. His discussion session included representatives
from left-wing environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and
the Natural Resources Defense Council, as well as self-described
conservatives. Those groups are involved in an initiative called
“Set America Free” that claims “the United States
can immediately begin to introduce a global economy based on next-generation
fuels and vehicles that can utilize them.”
“Syriana”
is also involved with a Web site called Participate.net,
which is running a “campaign to to reduce our dependence
on oil.” According to the site, “Oil addiction. It
saps America’s economic strength, pollutes our environment,
and jeopardizes national security.”
The reviews
of the film have kept with that political message. In A. O. Scott’s
November 23 New York Times review, it was obvious that
the media were OK with the message. “Someone is sure to
complain that the world doesn’t really work the way it does
in ‘Syriana’; that oil companies, law firms and Middle
Eastern regimes are not really engaged in semiclandestine collusion,
to control the global oil supply and thus influence the destinies
of millions of people. OK, maybe. Call me naïve – or
paranoid, or liberal, or whatever the favored epithet is this
week – but I’m inclined to give Mr. Gaghan the benefit
of the doubt,” said Scott.
Scott added that
it “pushes beyond the clichés of heroism and suspense
toward something a good deal more unsettling. Something you might
even call realism.”
