The Syriana syndrome

I had put it off long enough, I thought, and ordered via Netflix the movie Syriana. Before I begin ripping into some of the movie’s premises, I should say that I thought the movie was a brilliant piece of filmmaking. A wonderful fiction. For folks who care more about the angle of the lens—rather than the angle of the director—Syriana is about as good as it gets in Hollywood. But I’ve been of a mind lately to consider how art—film, novels, take your pick—can tell a complex story in a simple manner…without being simplistic. After all, the other George Clooney movie from last fall (Good Night, and Good Luck) managed to pull it off, so it’s not as if the idea of complexity so vexes Hollywood that filmmakers elude it altogether.

In this, Syriana is about as complex as Sergeant York. I mean, who really believes Gary Cooper’s Eureka moment up there on his rocky Appalachian promontory with that blue tick coon hound? Likewise, Syriana holds out to the audience a pretense of deep thought, of thoughtfulness rather, but in the end the resolution of the plot is about as tidy as Sergeant York’s homecoming.

This is made all the more stark because the movie’s storytelling is complicated. It’s fractured in the way a disaster movie is fractured, telling a collection of individual stories (of course, in disaster movies, the threads are then woven around the common experience of the disaster itself à la John Hersey’s Hiroshima). This fractured storytelling is a favorite device of Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter who also directed Syriana. His 2000 screenplay for Traffic proceeds in the same manner. The brilliance of Traffic is its ability to weave the individual characters—each of whom is redeemable or worthy of sympathy—into a corrupt tapestry of human interrelation, almost as if they are propelled by circumstance rather than volition. The tragedy it enacts is tragic precisely because of the enormity of the situation and the utter inability of people to control circumstance; studying the juxtapositions of power and influence in Traffic yields up a complex, unfulfilling conclusion: no one change in public policy will solve this mess. Because of this necessary complication, what is ostensibly an anti-drug war movie is far darker than merely a body politic making a poor choice, and thus the movie becomes a fine statement of the human condition.

Syriana attempts to replicate this effect, but fails because the evil, as portrayed, is too sure of itself, too powerful. Traffic works because even evil is subject to contingency; Syriana, however, is lorded over by an almost omniscient malignity (American oil and its government sponsors). The tagline for Traffic was perfectly stated in this regard: No One Gets Away Clean, and indeed, each character is sullied. This stain need not result in “justice” within the confines of the movie; it is enough for the audience to see it and understand it. The mere exposure of the corruption, and corruptibility, of each character is what adds a necessary level of complexity to the movie.

In Syriana, the stain is not worn equally by the characters involved, and one suspects eventually that he is watching a morality tale, not a satire, and there’s nothing particularly complex about a morality tale. The main character who bears this out is the emir’s eldest son, Prince Nasir (played by Alexander Siddig), who is passed over by his father in favor of his younger brother when it comes time to plan for the crown’s succession. Nasir appears to us as Western educated, conscientious, and mindful of the responsibilities that those in power have toward those who have none. He is a family man, his younger brother a playboy. He takes counsel from an equally conscientious (one might say naïve) derivatives trader, his brother from a corrupt veteran American lawyer. But of course we are going to sympathize with Prince Nasir!

But I can’t imagine that the reality is as simple as all that. And when Nasir is ultimately bumped off by the Americans whilst attempting a palace coup, the movie then funnels all judgment into this grotesquely simple contrast. Traffic never stooped to such a level, never sought to separate the gray into such vivid blacks and whites.

Syriana was loosely based on former CIA agent Robert Baer’s book See No Evil. I have not read the book (although I plan to eventually), but I can’t imagine that Baer’s book is as simple as all that either. My understanding is that Baer has written a sober and sobering account of his time in the field, and much of the evil depicted in the book is of the bumbling, pedestrian variety, more akin to Hannah Arendt’s Adolf Eichmann—in other words, it’s banal. In Syriana, this is transformed into an almost all-seeing, all-knowing malignity; this is metaphorically conveyed in the movie’s closing sequence, when the Americans target Nasir’s automobile (the fourth car in a large convoy) via satellite and then blow it up with a guided missile. Baer’s book is largely taken up with how we actually “see” very little, because of the mediocrity of our intelligence efforts in the field and of our analysis back at Langley; Syriana, by contrast, “sees” too much.

Take the movie’s key speech, delivered by Danny Dalton, a Texas oilman who gets nailed for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (bribing foreign officials). In an impassioned speech that calls to mind Ned Beatty’s wonderful, Shakespearian rant in Network (“You’ve meddled with the primal forces of Nature, Mr. Beale….”), Dalton holds forth:

“Some trust fund prosecutor, got off-message at Yale, thinks he’s gonna run this up the flagpole, make a name for himself, maybe get elected some two-bit, congressman from nowhere, with the result that Russia or China can suddenly start having, at our expense, all the advantages we enjoy here. No, I tell you. No, sir. Corruption charges! Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That’s Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.”

Just as Prince Nasir is presented as eminently incorruptible, Dalton’s screed portrays a system that is rotten to the core, a system where corruption begets corruption, a system so eaten up with cancer that there is no healthy cell left. But the truth is never as easy as all that. It’s easy to say “Corruption is why we win” and leave the concept on the table as if it is, indeed, the only reason. If Syriana had stuck more closely to Traffic’s ability to complicate its own premises, it would have been a far more compelling and believable movie. Instead, it’s merely a cartoon of American greed.